Teaching a class on blogging wrings me out like a wet washcloth in zero gravity. What I know winds up creeping out of me and hanging in the air between me and the people I’m meeting for the first, and often only, time.

What I believe, I wind up getting asked and answered over and over again, and everytime I see and hear it anew, not only because it’s a different person asking me but because I’ve read something or remembered something that informs my responses.

Tonight, while trying to answer a question about blog discovery, I remembered (but could not name) one of the once-biggest tools between the early days of blogrolls and our present-day incredibly shrinking home pages: Technorati. I’m outliving my memory of the bad old days, which is a bad thing when I’m trying to be thorough. I hope it’s a good thing when I’m trying to move forward.

Tonight someone asked me if I was trying to innovate my way out of a job. I came close to answering him that I was trying to make how I spent my time on the clock much more like everything I’ve loved doing off the clock over the last thirteen years, and that trying to do so was the only sensible plan in a world where more readers and communities were learning how to do exactly that.

We are not the buildings where we work any more than we are the mastheads we write under, but we are the conversations we foster and join in on, wherever and however they occur. The sooner we learn how to be ourselves everywhere, the sooner we’ll learn how to get better.

The spinning top
Made a sound
Like a train
Across the valley
Fading
Oh so quiet
But constant ’til it passed
Over the ridge
Into the distances
Written on your ticket
To remind you where to stop
And when to get off

FEIST – The Build Up from zac minor on Vimeo.

I needed to stay close to home, but I couldn’t avoid a couple of trips. The furthest I had to travel from our apartment today was less than half a mile by bicycle: first, over to an oddly crowded Tacos Mi Rancho for an afternoon lunch, and then to Flipside in the evening to pick up dinner and Trader Joe’s to pick up something more.

I did get a lovely nap in at some point, some writing, and a little quality time with a writer’s debut novel, Helene Wecker’s “The Golem and the Jinni.”

Wecker sets her novel in New York in 1899, at a time when immigrant Jews dominated the Lower East Side and a small colony of Lebanese and Syrian Christians made its home on the far west side, on Washington Street near the Hudson River. This was the great age of immigration, and the conceit of the novel is that both the Golem and the Jinni arrive in America as immigrants of a peculiar kind.

Before heading home from the grocery store, I did stop for a few Touts:

A good friend’s birthday deserved a proper celebration several months later on, so many of us gathered in an another friend of a friend’s place in downtown Oakland to mark the occasion with food, beverages, music and not a little joy.

The kicker was that we did it without letting her know. It’s been a while since I got to join in on something like this, and the simple, silly split, the binary tension between waiting to make something like this happen and then seeing it happen, in real time, well … I’m glad I had my phone out and the camera rolling, so I can go back to that moment as often as I think I might want to.

I stayed up until midnight pulling together bits of social media into narratives. Last night there was a raid in West Oakland at an infamous housing development, and similar raids in a corner of East Oakland and Antioch.

Then I did the same for a famous country singer who passed away, and for a look back at a school district’s week’s worth of bomb threats that led to cancelled classes, rattled nerves and police’s eventual arrest of a 16-year-old suspect.

Give me something I can sink my teeth into first thing in the morning, and I’m happier than I am with coffee alone. Sleep’s a long time away from food. Sleep is nothing. Food is something. I need sleep but want food far more often than the other way around.

Give me a path I can pause in front of, take in before I traverse its length, even if I’m just leaning my bicycle against the glass window outside an electronics store to replace a pair of misplaced headphones. I’m so used to shutting out the world, so unused to waiting for it to open.

Give me a movie I promised to go see, and friends to see it with, and even if I arrive too late to sit near them, I still have the darkness and popcorn and a drink and an antique of a well-told tale and the presence of mind to get up and walk out to the lobby as the credits roll so I can be there and meet them.

Distant disaster turns me inward. I can’t keep bad things from happening on the other side of the country, let alone my city, but I can keep up my end of things as I ought to be doing. I’m alive again, awake again, apt to grab hold of a bicycle, able to balance it down a flight of stairs and steer it to the gym. Nevermind the view nearby when I’m done or the other view on the way back home.

We are going to get through this month, insane blasts leveling Texas towns aside. We just have to. 

I

I went looking for a little music this evening. Eventually I found it.

At first, I thought what I wanted was trivia. Few things make me feel better faster than the display of the command of useless knowledge, marginal facts and long-forgotten data. But where I figured I’d do that started early and was almost done by the time I arrived.

Then I thought I’d try singing downtown at the sports bar that advertised it. But there was no sign of it twenty minutes after the hour it was supposed to start, and the bartender’s honest assessment of last week’s crowd sent me out the door to my car and north toward another option.

I can rattle off half a dozen spots I’ve sung at in the last couple of years, but never any more reliable or fun or thought-provoking than the White Horse Inn. Most nights, you’re not going to hear one man sing “At Seventeen,” “Cabaret,” “Y.M.C.A.” and “Space Oddity,” or listen to “Push It” (or separate, disparate renditions of “Annie’s Song” and “Take Me Home (Country Roads)”) entirely anew. But tonight wasn’t like most nights, thankfully.

We didn’t know how bad it was going to be. That took a few minutes of waiting. Then more assessments came in, and we knew it was going to be very bad. Then it got worse.

I spent the day looking at the Facebook page of a blogger who lives in Pleasant Hill, just up the road from the newsroom, and who was running with a bunch of friends and family. I also spent the day looking at Twitter like everyone else, like every day.

One of those days: word that the Mercury News is putting its building up for sale. Inevitable, really, like a lot of things.

In between other work Friday, I downloaded it as soon as I heard it was available in the Google Play Store. When I tried opening it, I kept getting that message about it not being ready for my device (despite my Samsung Galaxy Note II being one of the few devices listed for it). I go to XDA-Developers, but all I find are folks talking up build.prop editing workarounds. I uninstalled it, figuring I’d try again in a few days.

Fast-forward to this evening: I hit Techmeme, notice someone’s been hacking versions of Facebook apps to make them work on Android devices. I remembered Home, tried downloading it again and was able to open it.

First thoughts:

I’ve been using Launcher Pro since Gingerbread because I like its vertical scrolling style. What can I say? Sometimes I’m overly loyal, even after kicking the tires on half a dozen popular Ice Cream Sandwich-era launchers. Uninstalling it Friday meant playing around with Trebuchet, the built-in launcher on the Cyanogenmod nightlies I’ve been using off and on since Gingerbread (and on my Note II since early February). It’s come a long way since its debut, and I decide I like quite a few of its options.

Facebook is a lot of things to a lot of people, but I bet not many were looking forward to the day that it brought the desktop-PC screensaver experience to your smartphone.

“Apperating system” is exactly right.

I got dressed this morning and drove over to C.P. Bannon Mortuary on International Boulevard in East Oakland to say goodbye to a former co-worker.

I sat in the mortuary’s last row and took it all in: the prayers, the music, the mourning from a front-row relative, the testimonials and stories from people who knew him better and for longer than me. I may never understand the poise his daughter displayed in dancing and then speaking to all of us afterward. I remembered barely holding it together when my father died.

As hard as it was to know why we were all gathered in that room on an otherwise ordinary Saturday morning, it was easy to see why we came. So many knew and remembered him, and saw him do what he loved to do: take amazing pictures, and raise a young woman and send her off to college.