It’s a weird place I’m in lately, this general sense of discontent. It’s not with one specific thing and certainly not a person (or even people); it’s not my job or my home or – shockingly – my love life. It’s just this sense of malaise, this nagging stream of ‘ick’ that sits under the surface and makes me a bit grouchier, a bit more irritable. And I don’t like it. I don’t claim to be happy all the time, but this alternative – not a true opposite, per se, more of a distant relation, the cousin that sits at the corner at your family reunion and complains incessantly about the weather – truly sucks.

What confuses me the most is that I’ve made some good – no, great – changes in my life as of late.  New job that challenges and inspires me. New friends that are enhancing my already-pretty-awesome group of pals with outings and encounters and the best tri-tip steak I’ve had in the last 30 years. New(ish) furnishings that make me love being home and provide me a sense of stability that I haven’t had since I moved here. See? Pretty great, eh? But what I’ve found is that I make these fun plans – my evenings are often full with dinners and parties and game-watching and work events and concerts – and as I add them to my calendar in advance I’m excited and can’t wait for the week to arrive. And then it comes to be the day-of, and I find myself resentful that I had planned out my evening, instead wanting to go home and just relax. And then it comes full circle; I find myself at home with zero desire to cook for just me, tired even in anticipation of my early bedtime and evening full of DVR’d shows, and wish I had plans. It’s a lose-lose, this ‘grass is perpetually greener’ syndrome and I’m not really certain how to get out of the rut.

Maybe I need a trip. A mini-vacation. A weekend away to break up the routine of over-commitment. Something spontaneous, something fun, something unlike the un-routine I’ve got going in this here land o’ rut-dom. After all, if you can’t identify what your problems are, it’s not like you’re actually running away…

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The Great Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Aubs.

Taken directly after I finally escaped from the hay maze, no small feat.

So until recently, I had what you would call a moderately inappropriate
Facebook photo. It wasn’t obscene, or anything, it was just a lot of
cleavage. A. LOT. OF. CLEAVAGE. Which – if you know me – isn’t that
rare. I mean, whatever. It just isn’t. Yet as more and more people
joined Facebook, it became less of a "friends from college who wouldn’t
be phased by the low-cut dress I wore for my 30th birthday party" and
more of a "hi, boss. Hi, former boss. Hi, head of all advertising sales
at Google." While I’m proud to say I enjoy keeping in touch with former
– and current – employers, there’s a reason we wear business clothes to
work and going out clothes to get our DebauchAubrey on. Web 2.0 is much
more Bub.blicio.us than Boobilicious.

As such, I figured it was due time long overdue for me to find a better profile photo. So I started trolling through my Flickr favorites and Aubs-tagged
ones only to find out that I basically hate all the pictures of myself.
I don’t know if this is because my father, an avid photgrapher, had a
camera perpetually stuck in my face and has caused me to be
hyper-critical of my appearance. It might just be me being
hyper-critical about everything I do. Regardless, I had the hardest
time finding one of me that I actually LIKED, and the process was
nothing if not painful. Hello, world, I’m apparently vain.

Yet alas, the lovely Willo comes through in a pinch – the photo I
finally chose was one she used for her website and it’s her awesome "Words are so delicious"
t-shirt that I’m modeling. And, amazingly, kindly, many people have
commented nicely on the photo, meaning perhaps I’m just my own harshest
critic.

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IMG_2367.JPG, originally uploaded by dearanxiety.

Even though this photo is a bit blurry, I love it. Shows us after a HARD NIGHT of Pumpkin Carving. Exhausted, truly.

Oh, and I love my shirt.

   

       

   
            

       
               
       
            

            

               

03 no ones gonna love you

               

Band of horses

            
            

   
       

   

Originally posted on aubs.vox.com

My "Go Tribe!" Pumpkin

Originally posted on aubs.vox.com

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’m not a
die-hard baseball fan. If I were, however, I would OF COURSE be going
totally apeshit about my Cleveland Indians being one game away from
this year’s World Series. In fact, I’m following them, and as any good
Clevelander will admit, we’re a loyal crew. Loyalty trumps fairweather
any day (or at least for those who also grew up in a city often
ridiculed for its crappy weather and burning river. I mean, any support
helps.) Baseball is one of those sports that I find myself attending
for social reasons; sure, I’ll root for our team, and who knows…if I
was still living in Cleveland I probably would have season tickets at
the Jake. But I don’t. So I don’t. Instead, I live in a city where summer is theoretical and the Giants suck. Still, I made it to a few Giants games, one even with Lila Belle in tow. So there.

That’s
not to say I’m not a sports fan at all – there’s little more I love
than college game day at Carolina, the place that taught me how to
tailgate like a Southerner. I had to quickly learn to replace fleeces
and hoodies and grills with Bojangles Chicken and sundresses and dates
(yes. Football games were DATE EVENTS) and discovered various places to
stash airplane bottles of liquor. (Cleavage. Waistbands. Inside your
knee high boot. Hidden in a black sock against the bottom of your black
purse. I could go on…) I also love me some Carolina Basketball
because – hello – it’s UNC BASKETBALL. Heard of it? Yeah. It’s an
institution. But baseball…I don’t know. Maybe it was the years
PLAYING softball but it’s just one of those sports I’d rather play than
watch.

Despite that long-winded tangent, I’m really excited
for the Indians. This has been a good year for Cleveland sports – first
the Cavs, now the Tribe. Aww hell yeah. As such, I decided to place a
little wager with a Red Sox fan friend on the outcome of the series.
Now he’s a TRUE fan, I can say that with resolution, especially given
the (confidential) terms of the bet. But if you love me – ok, if you
like me, if you don’t hate me, if you for one second thought fondly of
me EVER – you’ll root for the Indians tonight. Because the stakes are
high. And I like my humility served best on someone else’s plate. It’s
tastier that way.

GO TRIBE!

It’s pretty embarrassing that I’ve had this site for 7 years and it didn’t occur to me until last night – when a friend POINTED IT OUT – that I hadn’t published the RSS feed in any other way than the default one by Typepad. Which means, apparently, that I could be obsessed with my stats on Feedburner as well as on Google Analytics. I mean, just what I need…a new obsession!

Actually, what I need is a crush. But that’s another story for another time.

Anyway, the point of this seemingly-pointless post is that I now publish a feedburner feed so may need to change your feed for me. So, either click that awesome little button over to the right, or subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aubs

Hallelujah. I’m all Web 2.0-ey.

I’ve long lamented the lack of seasons here in San Francisco – while most of you are trudging your hot, sweaty selves to the local pool for a break in the summer sweltering heat, we’re bundled up in our trusty cashmere sweaters shivering underneath our scarves. Yes. In the middle of July.

Come November, we enter into our form of winter; namely, constant rain. The type of rain that is so pervasive that at times you feel like even your soul is damp. The type of rain that causes people to be grouchy, short-tempered and all-around dour. I’m sure that the composer of many a dirge was inspired by winter in San Francisco. (Note that the only up-side of this nasty weather is that when it’s raining in San Francisco, it’s often snowing in Tahoe. YAY, ski house!)

Yet I must admit I too often get caught up in the negatives of the weather (this coming from a girl who grew up in Cleveland!) and don’t spend enough time regaling the beautiful days that we DO have. Namely, Fall.

Fall, for us in the City by the Bay, is often disguised as Indian Summer. Traditionally, our warmest months are August, September and October, to be followed by the aforementioned rainy season. It’s not unusual to have an 80-degree day in the beginning of October, and almost overnight it seems that we go from the heat to the rain with no traditional sense of Autumn interspersed. Yet when we do – wow. We may not have the glorious changing of the leaves, we may not get what I call “quintessential football weather” (again, I hail from the Midwest; this is how we gauge most of the seasons) but there are those days when the air turns brisk, the sun warms you only as much as the wind instantly blows it away, and the air just smells like Fall. Those are the nights when bundling up isn’t a chore, but a privilege; when warm cups of cider are the drink of choice and when the chilly wind blows through the open window, you’re really glad that you sprung for the extra-warm down comforter. Now if only I had someone to cuddle up with…

Never fear, I’m still here. (Wow – what a loud collective sigh of relief. And to think I thought y’all had forgotten about me.) No, alas, I’ve just been busy (yeah, yeah, you’ve heard that before) but this time, I mean it. Really busy. Busy as in the awesome sense of when you leave work you’re exhausted, but in a good way, the way that means you’ve worked all day on stuff that matters and are beat both physically and mentally and just want to crawl into your bed without dinner. What? That doesn’t sound good to you? Clearly you’re not as Type-A as I am, because that’s my favorite type of busy. Seriously.

We’ve been prepping for our big conference tomorrow, "The Business of APIs", which I hope to see some of you at. I’ve been in a battle royale with a little program called Powerpoint (formerly the bane of my existence, now my Frienemy) and have been working with our team to make sure everything is set for tomorrow morning. I’ve never been so involved with putting on a conference (nor developing the content) and let me say that while it’s certainly daunting in concept, it’s been a great learning experience.

So please hang tight – I promise I’ll return in due time with fabulous stories and much to tell about life, love and how I may in fact be a secret gourmet in training.