Jens Lekman is one of those people (there are several) that I seem to be consistently out of town for every time he comes through. So I was pretty excited to see him tonight. I bought literally the last ticket for tonight’s show. Tomorrow night’s was already sold out. He played at Bottom of the Hill, a mostly nondescript but still deservedly legendary local venue. It’s the same place where I saw The Thermals the night before and countless other acts.

I walked in and spotted an empty space two-thirds of the way towards the front. Never afraid to be opportunistic, I dashed in and stepped all over some broken glass. Apparently the two drunk girls next to me had dropped a bottle of beer a few minutes earlier. They apologized, but hey, I was pretty close to the stage now.

Opening for Jens was a comedian with the similarly awkward name of Tig Notaro. I know the whole “comedians opening for musicians” thing is kind of a big deal now, but I’ve also managed to miss most of those shows. So this was really the first time I’ve seen live stand-up since a terrible performance by Steven Wright five years ago. I was glad to discover that it really can be funny. I wonder if being a stand-up in a small music venue is a lot harder than a comedy club. There’s no distance separating you from your crowd. She was subjected to an almost non-stop barrage of shouted comments from the audience. People were generally playing along, but they kept interrupting her flow in ways that I suspect people at a comedy club wouldn’t. She handled it amazingly, though, never short of a witty, mocking reply.

Anyway, getting back to the two drunk girls. At one point they decided they were annoyed that they couldn’t see. I can understand and sympathize with this somewhat. But these girls were sitting down on a ledge. If they wanted to see better, standing up would have been the most obvious option. Instead, they opted to ask the man in front of them if he would crouch down a little bit. No, seriously, they asked him that. And guess what happened then? Not only did he manage to avoid rolling his eyes, but he actually spent the next ten minutes crouching down, until he got tired and just moved to the side. The girls were clearly appreciative. I know this because they spent most of the next ten minutes talking about how awesome it was that he was crouching down and how awesome Tig was and how awesome it was to have a comedian open for a musician and how awesome stand-up comedy was. Almost none of those ten minutes were spent actually listening to the awesome comedy. But the guy dutifully knelt down regardless, like a champ. I mean, a sucker. But also, a champ.

Oh, then Jens played. He was adorable, but duh. He kept saying all these anachronistically earnest things like “see this feather? I want you to keep this feather in the air for the entire next song.” Then he blew it into the crowd. Also “hey, I see some of you are recording this. And that’s great, and I’m glad you want to save this memory and I’d even love it if you sent the video to me. But please don’t post it on the Internet. I want this night to be magical and I want it to be just between me and you.” He’s so adorable! And so naïve! I hope someone was recording that charming little speech so that I can find it on YouTube later. It was all very cute, but my modern-day appropriately-jaded brain kept laughing along with everyone else, assuming he was being ironic. Didn’t he get the memo? Is sincerity still alive and well in Sweden? I don’t know if I could handle it there.

Jury duty on Wednesday was my third experience with this country’s court system in four months. By this point, I had grown incredibly weary of the whole idea and was quite certain that I was in for little more than several hours of sitting around waiting for something to happen that never would. I could hardly have been more prescient.

I showed up at 8:20, ten minutes early, and was the only juror that had arrived (out of the approximately seventy-five that would eventually appear). I proceeded to choose a chair, slouch down, and sleep for an hour before they started calling names. Fortunately for myself, I have no trouble whatsoever sleeping in public. The chairs weren’t particularly comfortable, but did I mention it was 8:30am? It was. I awoke briefly to watch a portion of a video where they told us how exciting and important it is to be a juror. It’s like someone got paid to market something that isn’t for sale. Hey videographer, didn’t anyone tell you we aren’t allowed to leave? You really don’t need to try so hard. Also, I strongly suspect that the parade of enthusiastic people with the title “Former Juror” wasn’t a representative sample. Where were all the people saying “yeah, it was pretty boring, but at least it got me out of work”?

When we got up to the courtroom, we were told that we’d be sitting in on a misdemeanor DUI case. The (very nice) judge spent a lot of time telling us about, you know, how awesome America is and how our jury trials rock the party like no other. Or something. It was sort of like a less endearing, more patriotic version of the previously mentioned video. The she started drawing names for potential jurors. She called 16, from which the goal (it later became clear) was to winnow it to 12 jurors and 2 alternates. While initially entertaining, my enthusiasm took a sharp turn off a cliff when I realized I’d be listening to jurors get questioned for the next four hours.

They asked the questions you’d expect. What neighborhood do you live in? What do the other adults in your household do for work? Have you been on a jury before? Do you hate Mexicans? That last one was implied, not asked outright. For the most part, the answers went about as you’d expect too: most people answered fairly directly and some people took the time to overshare about tangentially related things. A certain class of people did their best to prove themselves unqualified by claiming they were hopelessly biased. Most of these people were pretty unconvincing and transparent. No one had the balls to openly claim they hated Mexicans, but several people tried to claim they didn’t trust cops (ever!), didn’t trust people who drank, and one person claimed that DUI laws were unfair. The judge set the vast majority of them straight under repeated questioning. “So, even though you don’t think people should have a single drink if they’re going to drive, that’s not the law, and you don’t think you could apply the law in this case, even if you don’t agree with it?” They pretty much all relented under pressure from the judge.

After about an hour of jury questioning, the judge casually mentioned that the case was likely to go through Monday. Two potential jurors who were currently being questioned excused themselves saying they couldn’t be gone from work that long. Now I had a dilemma. I am going to DC for work on Monday. If I told the judge that, I’d have to reschedule my service within the next ninety days. But I’d already invested two hours into this exciting day. Should I admit my schedule conflict, go home, and come back some other day, once again at eight-freaking-thirty? Or should I wait it out, hope I don’t get picked, and be free from jury duty for a period of at least one year? If I got called up to be questioned, I’d be obligated to go home at that point. But by the time that happened, it could already be 1:30 or later, and then I would’ve have wasted a full five hours. (This ended up happening to one poor women.) In the end, my wait-and-see strategy prevailed and I got to go home without consequence.

I guess the most surprising thing to me is how much time these trials take. This was just a misdemeanor DUI case, and we spent five hours just selecting a jury! Then there were still three days of trial to go (those poor schmucks are still sitting in that courtroom as I type this). The Bill of Rights guarantees your right to a speedy trial, but that only applies to the time between arrest and the trial. Once the trial starts, all bets are off, it seems.

I’d read about Omegle before. It’s a service that randomly connects you to a stranger with whom you can chat. After being reminded about it again by Los Campesinos!’s blog, I decided to give it a shot. I love meeting strangers, and though strangers on the Internet hardly count, it seemed like it might be worth a few minutes to see what happened. It went pretty much exactly how I assumed it would:

There’s a guy outside my house who yells “oy” a lot at the top of his lungs. I first noticed it about a week ago, but it’s been almost every day since. Sometimes he yells it repeatedly for a few minutes at a time. Sometimes he just yells it once. Maybe The Wire has had an undue influence on me, but I can’t help thinking he’s calling for a re-up.

In other news, I got another summons to court. Weak.

Just like when I had to go to the Embassy, I admit to being curious about court. And just like my time spent at the Embassy, curiosity turned to boredom long before I was allowed to leave.

I got to court at 9am, just like my subpoena instructed. Far from the dignified chambers I had expected, the room featured squeaky wooden chairs and a judge’s bench that rose a mere two feet from the ground.  The judge’s post, as well as the tables for the attorneys, seemed to be cheap faux-birch particle board. I dug in and watched the buzz of the lawyers, trying to determine their relative amounts of smarminess based upon their suit choices. Court finally got rolling around 10am. I spent the next hour scribbling down legal terms so that I could look them up later (e.g. I’m pretty sure that “OR is denied” means “the defendant will not be released on her own recognizance”). Finally around 11am, the District Attorney in my case strolled in. I can’t explain why, but I took some bizarre pride in noting that he looked especially un-smarmy, even more so after meeting with him. He pulled me out of the court and explained that he didn’t normally deal with petty stuff like tagging (”me either!”, I wanted to protest), but spent most of his time working on domestic violence cases. He said the kid in my case had a domestic violence conviction as well as a few convictions for dealing drugs. I’d had plenty of misgivings about testifying against a guy because he’d written a tiny tag on a parking lot wall, but the domestic violence conviction sucked out a lot of my sympathy for him. The attorney said he was going to offer the defendant a deal (which included jail time because he’d broken his parole so often), and that the kid would be stupid not to take it. Thirty minutes later I got the news that the deal was denied and that I was to come back at 1:30am for the hearing.

It turned out the day was as beautiful as the rest we’ve had recently and I got kinda sad about being stuck inside. Then I realized I would’ve been sitting inside working regardless, so maybe this two hour break was a blessing. Wandering around SoMa soaking up the sun, I was smiling like a man who’d just completed a monumental chore. I ate some pizza alfresco and sucked down a few mid-day gins. If I wasn’t going to be back at work, I figured I could at least make the most of it.

When court finally started again at 2:15pm (45 minutes late, did you catch that?), there were a few more arraignments to be worked through. “My” case came up last. The defendent, dressed in jailcell orange (love the orange Vans!), spent much of his waiting time in tears. The DA, who seemed to have spent some time with this guy, told me he always did that in court. Just as the hearing was about to start, the lawyers headed up to the bench for a last-minute meeting with the judge. It turns out the kid claimed he was “addicted to tagging”. Um. He got sent to behavioral court or something for an evaluation. If the court agrees that he’s, ahem, “addicted to tagging”, he’ll go through some special program and get treatment. If the court agrees that it’s a ridiculous last-ditch attempt to save his ass from jail, they’ll reconvene the hearing and he might get offered a new deal. If he doesn’t take that, I’ll probably have to go back to testify in a jury trial.

Update: Just for the record, I’m not actually gunning for this kid to go to jail. It’s not like I have any say in it anyway. I’m just some weird playing piece in a game that has nothing to do with me. I wasn’t, as Emily thought, angry about the fact that he might end up in treatment. It’s probably a better place for him. But it is a ridiculous last-ditch attempt to save his ass from jail, clearly. I’m just stating the facts, here!

Remember when I accidentally busted some taggers? I got back into San Francisco tonight to find, among the junk mail, a subpoena to appear in court to testify against one of them. Presumably the one that was dumb enough to tell the cops his tagging name.

All this is very annoying. I definitely don’t want to testify in court against some kid who was spray painting on an abandoned brick wall. But the worst part? Court starts at 9am. Apparently realizing that a guy who busts taggers at 1am probably isn’t much of a morning person, they helpfully wrote “MUST APPEAR ON TIME” into a blank spot on the form. I’ll do my best, Ms. District Attorney, but I make no promises.

Yesterday I went to an urban planning talk at UC Berkz. Apparently it was the 60th birthday of their urban planning school. I guess that was exciting for most of the people there, but for me all it meant was that before the talk started, I got to sit through a long series of people who ranged from old to really old tell inside jokes and stories of the good ol’ days. A woman introduced a man who introduced another man who introduced another man and that guy finally introduced our speaker, Allan Jacobs.

The talk was about Curitiba, Brazil, which is apparently some urban planning mecca. Now, I’m certainly no professional urban planner, but I did take a few classes at school, and if I still had a myspace page I would probably list it in my interests, and I like to think that if I was at a party full of urban planners I could probably make well-intentioned uninformed comments that would only annoy them about 70%. (My conversation starter at such a party would go like this: “Oh, you’re an urban planner too? Cool. I know an urban planner in Minneapolis.” That’s assuming the party wasn’t in Minneapolis and Aaron wasn’t the one that invited me.) Anyway, the point of all this is that I have somehow never heard of Curitiba, Brazil. It sounds like an amazing place. Maybe he was overselling it, but it sounds like the kind of place that must be in every Urban Planning 101 textbook. Maybe I should read more Urban Planning 101 textbooks.

The professor talked about the incredible transformation that occurred in the city from the late 70s until the early 90s. In those fifteen years the city grew from about 650,000 people to 1.7 million people. But rather than all that growth turning the city into a sprawling mess, the city became even more livable as more people moved there. For example, the mayor set up a few bus-only roads which encouraged more people to take the bus which allowed him to set up even more bus-only roads, etc. Then he built special bus shelters that allow people to pay before the bus arrives, letting the buses achieve near-subway speeds without the expense of a subway. Which encouraged more people to ride, paying for further improvements, and so on.

My favorite story was about the time they tried to close one of the major streets to automobiles on weekends. Apparently the retailers on that street were furious and declared that they would drive on the street regardless. So the mayor rolled out a long, long sheet of paper down the entire length of the street and promised free paint to any child who wanted to come sit in the street and make some art, a tradition which continues every Saturday to this day.

Oh, also, they had favelas in the city, but the mayor couldn’t really do anything about them because class warfare was so en vogue at the time, or something. (Did you hear that Obama is going to make class war illegal? Love that guy!) But what he did was go to the favela, pass out plastic bags, and offer free bus passes to everyone who brought a bag full of trash. The before-and-after pictures were stunning.

Oh! And he set up a special “24 hour” section of town. They built an “outdoor mall”-style building and would only rent to people who agreed to keep their shops open 23 hours a day. The mayor reportedly joked about how that’s become the main area of town where students gather to conspire against him.

After the talk we ate salads that Kelly claimed were the size of her head but which were actually the size of two of her heads, assuming she had two heads, which she doesn’t.

I was on the phone with Carissa, staring out my bay window (as per usual) when I saw something strange. Across the street from me is a bus stop and the glamorous E&E Electrical Supply, a view I often make fun of but actually really enjoy for all the people-watching opportunities. While one or both of us chattered on about something apparently unmemorable, I watched a man in black clothing hop over the gate next to E&E while another man in black clothing tossed him a duffel bag. I said “I think I’m watching a burglary. Am I supposed to call 911?” Perhaps a bit slow, but in my defense, I didn’t wait for an answer.

While I was on the phone with 911, the other man was watching the street, playing lookout. After about a minute he hopped the fence too. Both were now hidden from my view, but the rest of the fence was covered in barbed wire, so neither could leave without me seeing them. After another minute a cop car rolled by, but was apparently oblivious to my call. I saw one of them run up to the fence to make sure he didn’t stop (and he didn’t). Three more minutes and they were both back over the gate with the duffel bag and around the corner.

Just in time a cop car responding to my call made it to the intersection, but instructions traveled slowly through the chain: me to the 911 dispatcher to the cop dispatcher to the cops. Where they should have turned left they instead went straight and I was sure the two had gotten away. Fortunately I got a call a few minutes later and they had two suspects down the block. It was a slow night for the cops, by their own admission, so the manhunt and crime scene inspection involved at least 8 officers. When the cops surveyed the site, what they found was an empty parking lot next to E&E. There were no doors into the building. Apparently I had just inadvertently busted some taggers. I most certainly would not have called 911 on some taggers writing on a brick wall in an empty parking lot. If it was the front of a business or something more destructive, sure, but the wall they wrote on was pretty much an ideal spot for tagging. I was unsure what to do about the two suspects waiting for me down the street.

Fortunately my dilemma resolved itself because I honestly couldn’t positively ID either one of them. Both got taken into the station, however, because one fought with the police and the other admitted his tagging name which was then found on the wall. Had you kept it cool, kids, you would’ve walked away. Ah, well.

I got two pictures published on two of my favorite blogs on the same day. First I was on The Ampersand blog. And then I was on SFist. I’m pretty sure this means I’m officially a journalist.

Update: and, hey! They picked up the SFist story on Mission Mission, another of my favorite blogs (where a quote of mine was also featured last week)!

I was reading this month’s issue of The Atlantic and in amongst an unrelated but interesting psychology article about the science of self were these quotes which relate to a debate I’ve been in increasingly over the past few months.

First, from the introduction:

[I]f you ask people about their greatest happiness in life, more than a third mention their children or grandchildren, but when they use a diary to record their happiness, it turns out that taking care of the kids is a downer—parenting ranks just a bit higher than housework, and falls below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying, eating, and cooking.

And, more in depth:

[W]e are often mistaken about what makes us happy. Consider again what happens when we have children. Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with images and stories about how wonderful kids are. We think they make us happy, though they actually don’t.

I am fairly certain this means I win the debate.