Cali memories of the future, back to my own reality in NY...

So Mon got married the weekend I was in Cali. She is my last standing homegirl...Or should I say was? That's it...Now I am absolutely the last single homegirl who is without child of my closest girlfriends. But my Mom, like I said in a previous entry had notions of trying to fix that by matchmaking me with this Korean civil engineer...Man, was that disastrous....?! I knew that we wouldn't be a good match just by sitting in the car about to go into the restaurant 'cuz I hoped it wasn't him when I was watching this guy with a swarthy kind of hunkering shouldered-dragging motion go in there, and sure enough, he was sitting at a table and recognized my Mom when we walked towards him. He was nervous at first. I kicked my Mom under the table as she introduced us clumsily and then left the restaurant, paying for the meal, leaving me without a car so that he would have to drive me home. His first question was, "Can you cook?" He had absolutely no sense of humor. I left him so many openings to be witty and funny, but nothing...His talk of work was the topic that got him to be most loquacious. He spoke of the difference between suspension and girder bridges and how the Bay Bridge was both. He was working on the calculations of an already designed construction at his job and talked of how he didn't really have to do anything because he trusted the engineers who actually created the construction design, he wasn't really one of the engineers who actually created stuff. And that's kind of the impression I got from him regarding his way of life in general. He got a PhD, so Mom made a big deal of it, but the way he talked about it was like he just didn't have any drive to do any better. I mean, when he first got to the US, he went to Ohio State and they don't have much of an Engineering Department so he went to North Carolina, not University of North Carolina but North Carolina State. He isn't very smart about places, obviously. He went to a Korean restaurant after work when he first moved to Oakland and parked off Telegraph and his new GPS device got stolen through a broken window. He was stuck on that. He hasn't bought a new one so he hasn't explored anywhere, like it's a GPS device that he needs to do that. He's lucky his whole car didn't get stripped or stolen, I think. It's stupid to leave something like that on the dash. I felt a bit guilty when he dropped me at my Mom's 'cuz she lives in a really nice part of Oakland, but he knows nothing about me, how I grew up, where I live now. We had nothing in common. He said he liked 70's and 80's music and I said, "Oh, so you like Zeppelin?" and he replied, "Oh, they're too hard rock..." What the hell kind of 70's music is he talking about then? When I explained I was a punk rocker when I was a teen he didn't seem to hear me or maybe didn't understand what I had said. He said he didn't like rap music because they used to play it in the clubs in Korea in the 90's (he specifically mentioned MC Hammer and Bobby Brown) and said that talking over music wasn't music. Anyways, it was a tormenting time and all I could do was think when the hell can I go home and smoke a cigarette? Anyways, he drove me home and we didn't even say good bye to one another. At least we weren't fake with one another. And then I missed Alex. And wished he was with me instead. The trip wasn't a total loss though. I got to kick it with Fred and we hung out feeding crackers to the purple head ducks, making fun of the geese after Super burritos at a good new place called Los Cantaros that replaced Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. I walked a little ways around South Shore, the beach in Alameda, after a cup of Starbuck's in the early morning with Lisa...And I got to hang out with Joelle for about an hour or so while thrift shopping at the Goodwill on Alcatraz and San Pablo...See, I arrived with one bag, but left with two since I've been having to stock up on red tops and khakis for work at Target...Mom really helped me out there...She drove me out to Napa and we went Outlet shopping...YEAH for Outlet Shopping!...Don't get me wrong...It wasn't all shopping and hanging out with friends. I also worked for my Mom, showing apartments and taking photos of properties, doing inspection walk-throughs and Mom had a flooded water main scare and her maintenance man had ripped up the sidewalk and so she was terrified the City was going to fine her, so I had to do a couple of drive-bys to check on the progress of the situation...Anyways, the weather was beautiful and then I came back to being stuck in a holding pattern for an hour above New York after a half hour delay in Denver and then a two hour taxi ride which would normally take 20 minutes under better conditions. Of course, the day I get back it has to be the worst snowstorm we'd seen all season.