Steven Rubio

And I mean that literally. You know something is up when I post over here for the first time in more than a year! I just got the test results back from a stool sample I sent in, and it came back positive. I'd say the odds are roughtly one in five hundred thousand that anything serious is wrong, but as far as I can tell, the positive result means I'm going to have to have a colonoscopy. Based on what I read about that procedure ... aw shit.

From batdina:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I'm assuming we have to read the whole thing, so I'll say no)
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (see The Bible, above)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (I forget, which probably says something)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (see #63 above)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

How pathetic that I've only read 26 but have a PhD in English. I only loved three. I don't intend to read any of the ones I missed, either. There needs to be more non-fiction on this list.

And, since my favorite book isn't on the list:

101 The Plague - Albert Camus

And for some reason, I feel like it would be disrespectful to talk about it on my main blog, so here I am.

I saw the victim's sister on TV last night, crying and talking about how he loved his three kids and how he coached a lot of sports teams and how much he meant to the kids who played under him. It really got to me ... this woman, when she was little she was quite a handful, she knew how to give me the business, and when you don't see someone very often, you forget that they've grown up, and there she is on TV, a grown woman grieving over her dead brother.

Then a friend came from down the street ... they'd had a party going on down there yesterday, I hadn't thought much about it, but my friend said it was the victim who'd gotten it started, came by in the morning with some meat, said let's fire up the BBQ and play some dominos, and the party was on, right there in the front yard. Later he had to go pick someone up ... he called while he was gone, said he'd be back in five minutes ... he never made it back.

I was talking to my son a bit ago, and he said he felt bad for me and Robin, because this kind of thing is outside our sense of the world, and he's right, but I worry about him, too, because he feels like shit about this but he's also kinda fatalistic about it, and it's sad to me that murder can become something, not exactly expected, but unsurprising.

I really don't have anything to say, but I wanted to say it anyway.

A few hours ago, we got a call from our daughter. Someone she grew up with had been murdered ... best as I know, she was much closer to mutual friends than to the victim, but it clearly was very hard on her. She called her brother, a bit closer in age to the man and probably closer to him as a person as well ... he later called and checked in, too.

I wanted to know more, so I checked SFGate and found a brief story about the event. I noticed that there were more than 60 comments already. I made the mistake of wondering what kind of comments would there be about a very recent story about a shooting, and started reading the comments.

Some were generic "Berkeley sux." Some conflated Berkeley and Oakland and said "Oakland sux." Many referred to the victim as a thug ... this was when he had yet to be identified to the public. But they assumed. Someone who knew him said he was a father of three ... someone else said, in essence, who cares. Finally, someone dug out an old news story about the victim, quoted it, and said he got what he deserved.

Frustrated, I posted my own comment, explaining that the victim was a friend of my kids, that I understood the desire to mouth off since I do it all the time myself, but that, given the number of people I know personally who are grieving right now, I was ashamed to read the comments.

On SFGate, you can give a thumbs up/down to individual comments. Within three minutes, I'd gotten a thumbs down from someone.

Well early in the morning the cannoneer cried
"I seen the sailor's warning in the western sky"
Well mountain man, if you can, cut me down a fir tree
Branches full of candlesticks for baby and me

And my darling cried, she said "Honey, the weathervane
lately it's been pointing the way to heaven
Scatterbrains, scatterbrains, watch out where you fall
Champagne, champagne, a round for all the old choir boys
They're busting off the altar chasing Dinah through the hall
They're bustin' off the altar chasing Dinah through the hall"

Every morning at that time, we went to Bodo's Bagels and split a three-cheese sesame. They always played a mix tape of Rolling Stones tunes there, and I found it immensely comforting. The first song was "Sitting on a Fence," an acoustic ballad with Mick and Keith singing about how stupid people are for falling in love and settling down. I was amazed at how soothing their voices were, two brash and pretty young mod boys, harmonizing so confidently about how people who stay together are suckers, and laughing at them. And they're right -- what could be scarier, stupider, than staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified? "Sittin' on a Fence," that was the life for Mick and Keith. (The crazy thing is, Mick and Keith are total hypocrites -- they've been a married couple longer than my parents. If Keith really believed in "Sittin' on a Fence," he'd be Jeff Beck, who never gets trapped in a situation he doesn't control, and hasn't made a decent record since he quit the Yardbirds.)

-- Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape

Might as well say something here. Even though I think of this as my place to "hide," I worry that what I say will escape. Here's something about me:

1) I am starstruck

2) I am embarrassed about being starstruck.

So once in awhile when I want to say "OMG I just talked to So-and-So!" I can do it here ... in code.

A person could check my other blog and figure out who I'm talking about here. So let's just say someone I've admired from afar for decades, who has a connection to someone who meant/means a lot to me, replied to an email I sent! The starstruck part of me is thrilled ... I also think it's cool because this person is 84 years old.

So, to tally up the "famous people who have made some kind of contact with me via my blog or some extension," there's a writer who wrote/directed one of my favorite movies ... another writer who has written some of my favorite television episodes ... a very famous record-company mogul (this one could have been a fake, I've never quite decided) ... and the star of a semi-documentary film of their life in the 60s. The least famous is probably the latter ... they are also the one I was most startled by, in that "I can't believe it" mode (that person was not a fake, I'm pretty sure).

Sometimes I wonder why I don't just make these posts friends-only so I could use "real" names ... although in the case of the person whose email inspired this post, pseudonyms might actually be appropriate.

Another episode of Post It Here, No One Will Know. This time I'm talkng about siblings, so I'm hiding.

I was thinking about immigration the other day, because my sister who is a teacher is doing a segment of one of her classes on the subject. And then last night, as the Boston Red Sox made it to the World Series, my other sister posted a couple of happy items on her blog ... she is a member of what she (and others) call "Red Sox Nation."

Well, it irritates me far out of proportion to the reality, how much my sister loves the Red Sox. You see, like the rest of my family, she grew up in the Bay Area. Unlike the rest of my family, she wasn't much of a baseball fan. The boys in the family are Giants fans ... my youngest sister, who grew up when the A's were winning World Series, is an Oakland fan. But my older sister didn't really have a team, or much of an interest, far as I can tell.

Some years ago, she married a man from New England who is, as might be expected, a longtime Red Sox fan. She moved to the Northeast, and became a rabid Sox fan herself in what seemed like about four minutes. It's good to share passions with your partner ... god knows I'd love it if my own partner liked baseball ... the Red Sox are pretty easy to like if you're from that area ... there is really no reason why my sister shouldn't be a Red Sox fan.

But it drove me crazy, to hear her talk about the players as if she'd known them for years. And when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in a gazillion years, those old Sox fans were jubilant, as well they should have been ... but my sister was right there with them, babbling happily about Manny this and Papi that. And I couldn't help myself, as a fan of a team that has never won the World Series in the 50 seasons I've followed them since they moved to San Francisco in 1958 ... you'd think I'd understand how those fans must have felt, I think I did, but my sister, she'd only been a fan for a few years, she hadn't earned more than a brief moment of happiness at most. All those people who'd suffered for so long, and here was this interloper trying to ride their coattails.

And this morning, I realized something that I didn't like about myself. Well, I already knew this about myself and already didn't like it, but I have a new way of looking at it that makes me look even uglier.

The way I'm reacting to the above, it's like I think my sister is an immigrant to Red Sox Nation. And that I think that makes her a second-class citizen.

And that's just the way bigots think about real immigrants. And I don't like to think I'm that way, not even for a moment, not even on LJ.

So I write about them here, where nobody knows my name.

I'm on a mailing list for people who went to high school together. Today we learned that the mom of one of our members had died at the age of 89. What followed was an outpouring of prayers for the survivors, and long tales of yore, about what a great mom she was.

I don't think I ever met the woman, although I was pretty good friends with her daughter. But I did talk to her on the phone once.

The daughter had been asking me ... well, it sounds odd as I type this, she was asking me if I thought she should be french kissing boys. Why she asked me, I don't know ... certainly she and I never kissed. I told her she should do whatever felt right to her, and soon afterwards, the conversation ended.

Later that evening, there was a phone call at my house. Somebody answered it, said it was for me, I picked up the phone ...

And I spent the next several minutes listening to the girl's mother chew my ass about telling her daughter inappropriate things.

That's pretty much all I can think about, while everyone else is offering kind thoughts about the deceased.

Hiding out here in my secret space, to discuss something I was just told. I'm leaving out some specific details ... no reason, really, except that to the extent this LJ is secret and separate from my "real" blog, I might as well strive for anonymity. One of my upcoming anthology essays is on a television show that is popular with those of a conservative political bent. My essay is, in part, about how our political perspective can get in the way of our appreciation of art. I refer to an old article in Ms. Magazine, "Can a Feminist Love the World's Greatest Rock Band," about the Rolling Stones.

When the project was first proposed, there was some suggestion that while we might approach our topics within a political framework, there was no desire to be "polarizing." Which was fine with me.

Well, I just found out that the guest co-editor of this anthology is someone who is fairly well-known in conservative media journalist circles. Which probably serves me right, given my take on the assignment in the first place. But here's the frightening thing ... apparently he "really liked" my essay.

I'll have to worry about this one for awhile.

I find it interesting, the reasons I post here. I do it because I assume it's more anonymous than my "real blog," since very few people know it exists (although Google knows, so it's not entirely secret). I also do it because I am, for lack of a better word, "ashamed" of certain things, and while I don't keep all of those things entirely to myself, on occasion I'll hide them here.

And one thing that sets off my Shame Factor appears to be the ease with which I get star struck. Hence my post about getting a blog comment from someone in a 60s movie ... I don't want to seem like too much of a geek.

Well, today I got a couple of emails from that person, and I'm delighted to be even marginally in her virtual world. Which does indeed make me a geek. I've also been exchanging emails with one of her friends. And all of this because we share an interest in an obscure 60s documentary that has been seen by very few people, far as I can tell.

Back to hiding ... but first, I'll offer an anecdote I don't think I've told before. It's not a very good one, but I should reward the people who read my LJ. One of the people in the 60s movie later starred in an Antonioni movie ... I don't know why I'm not giving out actual names here, guess I'm still trying to be secretive, there's no secret, you can look at the original stuff on my blog and figure it all out. Anyway, the star of the documentary mentioned in her comment where the "Antonioni person" was in that movie. And now I come to another one of my six-degrees tales of star-struck Stevenness. This was back in the early 70s, either before we were married or soon afterwards. Robin used to babysit for an art professor, and we got to be friends with the family. One day Robin was doing something with the artist's mailing list, as I recall ... anyway, somehow, either from her telling me or my just looking for myself, I saw that on that mailing list was ...

Monica Vitti.

I also remember that when the artist and his wife went to Europe, on their return, he would tell stories about hanging out with "Michelangelo" ... he was on a first-name basis with Antonioni, apparently.

Like I say, not much of an anecdote, but something to appease my LJ readers until the next time I post here, in seven months ...

Here's what Today looked like in 1968, from the back cover of the Revolution album:

I stick the occasional post over here so I don't seem like too much of a geek on my "real" blog.

Louise "Today" Malone just left a comment on that blog.

I'm sure this means nothing to most/all of you. Louise, who at the time had changed her name to "Today," was the "star" of a late-60s movie about hippies, Revolution. I only saw the movie for the first time a few years ago, but I've been listening to the soundtrack for almost 40 years. To say I'm star struck is an understatement. This is almost as good as when Michael Tolkin posted a comment.

At the request of leela_cat:

IF YOU'RE ON MY FRIENDS LIST,

I want to know 28 things about you. I don't care if we've never talked, never liked each other, or if we already know everything about each other. I really don't. You are obviously on my list, so let me know with whom I am friends!

1.Your Middle Name:
2. Age:
3. Single or Taken:
4. Favorite Movie:
5. Favorite Song:
6. Favorite Band/Artist:
7. Dirty or Clean:
8. Tattoos and/or Piercings:

HERE COMES THE...

1. Do we know each other outside of LJ?
2. What's your philosophy on life?
3. Would you have my back in a fight?
4. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest?
5. What is your favorite memory of us?
6. Would you give me a kidney?
7. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
8. Would you take care of me when I'm sick?
9. Can we get together and make a cake?
10. Have you heard any rumors of me lately?
11. Do you/have you talk(ed) crap about me?
12. Do you think I'm a good person?
13. Would you drive across country with me?
14. Do you think I'm attractive?
15. If you could change anything about me, would you?
16. What do you wear to sleep?
17. Would you come over for no reason just to hang out?
18. Would you go on a date with me if i asked you?
19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
20. Will you repost this so i can fill it out for you?

Charlie's Stonehenge, sampled and remixed:

Someone was kind enough to create an LJ syndication page for my "real" blog. If you are an LJ user who would like to be able to read my blog via your friends page, go here:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/srubio_online/profile

Taken from cbertsch:

Book Meme:

a) pick up a book which is the closest to you at the moment
b) open page 123
c) find the third sentence
d) post it in your Live Journal (plus the instructions)
e) don't choose the book, just pick up the one closest to you

"It was these people who helped create the commonplace fear and loathing of our two national flags."

Trying to protect privacy here while asking a question of someone for whom I don't think I have an email address. If this is you, drop me a note at srubio@gmail.com: