Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

The Best Beeping News a Prius Owner Ever Heard

A few months ago, I watched with tears streaming down my cheeks as my shiny silver BMW convertible drove away with its new owner. Oh, how I loved that car; sleek and fast, it cornered like it was on rails and went from zero to sixty... very, very quickly. I spent many enjoyable hours driving to Napa or zipping along Highway 1, wearing my giant sunglasses and cranking my music through the Harman Kardon speakers.

Unfortunately, Petra didn't fit into my sweet little ride. I tried it once. That trip lasted for two whole blocks before I realized that I was playing with my life and hers. We promptly returned to the garage.

Enter the Prius. Neither sleek nor fast, it corners like... well, let's just say it doesn't do corners. Zero to sixty? You don't want to know. Especially if you're in the car behind me, and you'd like to get to work on time.

But Petra's mama has to do what Petra's mama has to do, and I might be able to handle my new granny status on the road if it wasn't for the beeping.

If you don't already know, let me enlighten you: the Prius is a beeper on wheels. This beeping car beeps constantly; being inside of it is akin to having a front row seat at the Beep Symphony. Start the car: beep, beep. Put the car in reverse: beep, beep, beep, beep. Open the door: beep, beep. Put on your seatbelt: beep, beep. Take off your seatbelt: beep, beep. Set a bag of groceries in the passenger seat: beep, beep, beep, beep.

Perhaps it's a form of new-wave ambient music, a medley of beeps to serenade you as you save the planet. This is how we reduce our dependency upon foreign oil: one beep at a time.

Have I ever mentioned that repetitive noises make me crazy? That hearing a sound repeated more than two or three times in a row can reduce me to tears?

SOMEONE, ANYONE: MAKE IT STOP!!

That's where Zem Joaquin enters the picture. I've long been a Zem fan, from back in the day when she was one of the founders of Splendora. These days, Zem runs the blog ecofabulous, writes about "green" design solutions for House and Garden magazine, and generally lives a stylish, sustainable life.

As if that wasn't wonderful enough, she posted an entry on Wednesday that changed my life: how to turn off the beep on your Prius. As soon as I saw the post, I printed it out, ran straight to the garage, and followed the steps. It worked: Halle-beeping-lujah. I sat in the drivers seat, repeatedly switching into reverse and taking my seatbelt on and off, just to assure myself that it was true. After five long months of near-constant beeping, the silence felt like a benediction.

I am saved!

If it's beeping, you're weeping, so get on over there and hack the beep.

P.S.

To my (former) BMW: I miss you. Sometimes I look at your pictures, and feel sad that I don't get to hang out with you anymore. I hope your new owner knows what a great deal he got.

To BMW Corporate: Make a hybrid, will you please? Preferably one that goes zero to sixty in less than five minutes. That would truly be the Ultimate Driving Machine.

Making It Up As I Go

Though I've never attended a TED conference, I've long been in love with the idea of an event at which visionaries from many different disciplines gather to exchange thoughts, dreams, travelogues and stories. When the TED crew began to post the conference talks online, I was beside myself with excitement. Since then, I've spent many enjoyable hours watching and listening to the talks.

This morning I discovered another gem: Maira Kalman. Maira is an incredibly talented illustrator and creative thinker who gives herself permission to be fully... herself. She makes up words, admits to numerous idiosyncrasies, doesn't have a specific narrative arc to her talk, seems totally at ease in her skin. She describes starting a company based on the premise of knowing nothing.

"Good things come out of incomprehension," she says, and I find myself wishing I could invite her to tea.

As a writer, I struggle to balance careful planning with letting go and allowing things to unfold around me. I realize that being open to life's serendipities requires a sense of trust that the ideas and projects and people I need will appear at exactly the right moment. Even knowing that, I often find it difficult to consciously release my expectations and open myself to the unknown. Watching people like Maira strengthens my sense that the effort to be effortless (does that make sense in some  kind of crazy way?) is worthwhile. 

"I daydreamed through my life," she says, with complete confidence.

I won't try to distill it further; you can watch it yourself:

One last thought on this topic: over the summer, I kept an audio CD set in my car of a talk given by Thich Nhat Hahn, in which he described a conversation with a friend about his poetry. The friend told him that she greatly admired his poetry, only there wasn't enough of it.

"If you would spend less time gardening," the friend said, "you could write more poems."

To which Thich Nhat Hahn replied: "The time I spend growing lettuce is indistinguishable from the time I spend writing poetry. You cannot have one without the other."

This is a loose paraphrase from memory, as I finally had to return the CD set to the library, but I'm still thinking about it, reminding myself that the time I spend aimlessly wandering or taking an afternoon nap  will in fact make my work better, that my conscious mind is but a small part of what I know, and that surrendering to the mystery is a form of intelligence.

Here's to dawdling and daydreaming and humming when you can't remember the words. Here's to not knowing what is going to happen in the end.

All I Want for Christmas

Friday morning.

The rain is falling in sheets outside my window; car tires make hissing sounds against the pavement as they drive past. I’ve got Moby on the stereo (“If Things Were Perfect” is sooo delicious on a rainy day) and candles flickering on my desk, but there’s no way to escape the to-do list scrawled on a sheet of scrap paper to my left. I’ve been typing away for several hours already this morning (wine label copy, if you must know) and there’s more to do, but I feel grateful that I’m not sitting in traffic.

Indulge me, if you will, in a daydream break.

The Neiman Marcus Christmas Book arrived in the mail yesterday – thick and shiny, with a glossy green cover sporting a gold-embossed butterfly. They’re trying to tempt me to change my zero balance, the sneaky bastards, and for a few moments, I did toy with the notion of dusting off my card and calling the 800-number.

What did I need more: the studded leather trench coat from Burberry (page 21) or the fluffy fur poncho (page 118)? The knee-high Ferragamo boots (page 14) or the sparkly Pucci dress (page 12)? Then common sense prevailed as I remembered that I don’t wear fur, and $11,000 for a trench coat might be a dollar or two more than my budget will allow. But seriously, how many CRAB cookbooks would I need to sell before I could afford those boots?

Then I happened upon page 126, where a picture of an idyllic mountain landscape is superimposed with a tousle-haired man staring broodingly into the camera. “A Slice of Heaven,” the caption read. What are they  selling here, I wondered – a picnic in a grassy meadow with McDreamy?

Blue and Yellow and Happy All Over

Saturday mid-morning, I slip on my sunglasses and drive out to the marina in Sausalito. The sky is a  bright, vivid, pulsing blue, made to order for the 2007 Air Show. I arrive before my friends, so I grab a cappuccino and wander around, smiling at names like Sea You Around! and Fear Knot.

The reflections in the water trigger the ghost of an old memory, and at first I can't quite call it up. Then it occurs to me: about six years ago, I agreed to help an up-and-coming "artist" curate and promote her photography show. Her "portfolio" consisted mainly of digital photographs of boats reflected on water. She printed them out on her LaserJet, using high-gloss paper. The images were pixelated around the edges, and the paper wrinkled if you so much as glanced at it.

Staring into the water at the marina, I remember sifting through stacks of these glossy reflections, trying to determine which were the "best" of the lot while she huddled in the back of her apartment-slash-studio, clutching a cigarette and cursing into her telephone. A couple of hours before her opening show, she ran to the local art store to buy the cheapest frames she could find, slapped the photos inside and stuck price tags on them.

Wherever you are, I think to myself, I hope you've gotten better at photography or have switched careers.

Thankfully, my friends arrive and rescue me from Memory Lane.

We climb into the boat, and everyone finds a seat. We're off.

Diet Coke: the preferred beverage of sea captains everywhere.

I never get tired of the Golden Gate Bridge. I adore her from every angle. Including this one.

We slide beneath her, and head out into the curve of the Bay, just in time for the show.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

October. The crows circle the park where Petra and I walk, serenading us with hoarse, croaky verse. We step on the acorns scattered in our path, scattering leaves with our feet, walking fast to stave off the chill. I drink a whole pot of tea in the mornings, wrapping my hands around my cup, hoping that its warmth will penetrate my hands.

There is something magical about this time of year; something mysterious, mist-soaked and obscure. This is the season when we honor death, pausing to reflect on the inevitable ending of everything we hold dear, of the richness found in decay and detritus, the promise of newness contained in every fallen leaf and withered stem. I'm planning to make my way back to a little shop I found in Petaluma at this time last year, where they set up a display in their courtyard with the names and pictures of lost family and friends; melty candles flickered around the photos, and rocks and shells and bones clustered around the edges. It was lovely.

October doesn't have the breathless charm of spring, or the bright, blowsy, girl-next-door good looks of summer, but then I've always found beauty in strange places. Just look at the walls in my office, festooned with lithographs of fleas and spiders and a grim-faced eel, next to a set of rusty skeleton keys and a bat skull. No wonder I've  always loved this month...

Here's what else I'm noticing right now:

Purple vegetables. Everywhere I turn at the market, my eyes are falling on gorgeous vegetables in deep, bruised shades of aubergine and amethyst and violet, that shimmering intersection between crimson and blue ~ purple tomatillos, shiny eggplants, crackly-skinned onions, purple basil, cabbage. Full Belly Farms had purple Chinese long beans last Thursday, and I couldn't resist. I haven't cooked them yet; they're so pretty that I can't decide what to do with them. For a quick dinner last week, I made a sauté of purple cabbage, Italian sausage, purple onions and pine nuts, covered with a flurry of basil. Mmm.

Other purple things. Like this flickr shot.

My adventurous readers. Every now and then I get a note from someone who stumbled across my post on making yogurt in a Crock Pot, with a question or two. A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a reader who had the great idea of installing a router to act as a reostat on the Crock Pot instead of splitting the cord and patching in a dimmer switch, like I did.  Brilliant!

My gluten-free readers. I'm astounded by how many people find my blog because of my post on being occasionally gluten-free. If you're in the restaurant business, you might be amazed to discover how many people type in "gluten + free + restaurants + San Francisco".  Celiac disease doesn't appear to be going away, and I hope we'll see more  gluten-free options on menus in the future.

French fries. The crispy, salty French fries at Spruce just might be the best fries in the city.  They're so good that, in the hypothetical  instance that you and I went to Spruce together for a meal, you'd have to order your own, because I wouldn't want to share.

On the chalkboard of my mind today: "When you make that deep internal shift from your problem-solving mind to your truth-knowing mind, you don't need to search for the answers anymore. The search for answers is over and the process of more fully accepting and owning what you already know has begun. All that is not authentically "you" falls away, and you have a new center of being that allows you to see very clearly what is needed to affect changes in your life. You stop trying to fix yourself and start being yourself." - Baron Baptiste, from Journey Into Power.

Happy October.