I spent the weekend in this house, up around 6500ft at South Lake Tahoe. A guy named Christian rents a house every year for his birthday and invites a bunch of people, and I got invited. They're all wonderful, interesting people, some I knew and some I didn't. I was completely unprepared for the amount of food they brought: probably about three times more than needed. Deli sliced roast pork, salami, fruit, pounds and pounds of grillable meat. Supposedly there was an enormous pile of vegetables, but too much meat and too few vegetarians meant we barely put a dent in it. Saturday night, people were making beer-stewed chicken (it was supposed to be coq au vin, but all our red wine was only suitable for drinking, not cooking) and the best macaroni & cheese ever; but that was all going to take too long, so I grabbed a couple lengths of Niman Ranch tri-tip out of the fridge, coated it with salt, and grilled it to a pink, buttery perfection I'm not entirely sure I could manage again. Quality ingredients matter.

And we went sailing on Saturday! We rented a 25-foot O'Day to go out on Lake Tahoe. We had me and another guy as the skilled sailors, which let us hand off steering and keeping an eye on things so we could enjoy the incongruity of sailing on a warm May day with beautiful clear water and very tall snow-covered mountains looming over us.

I love when people want to figure me out, trying to get a sense of who I am by asking me direct questions. I'm complicated, and full of rich and juicy contradictions I'm quite happy with. I still surprise myself constantly, so I expect anyone else, without access to my stream of thoughts/memories/experiences, will just have a world of trouble trying analyze the whole mess. I mean, when we get to know people, we don't know them as a set of contingencies and decisions and algorithms and facts: we know them as people, spirits, whole creatures who first and foremost simply are. (Not everyone thinks about it in these terms, and there are some people wired very differently--I have a young second cousin once removed [I'm not making this up] who recognizes and catalogs the people he meets by their homes. So, where most of us will do relationships--"How do you know George and Petunia?"--he'll ask about the color of your house and how many rooms it has.) I've gotten pretty good at being.