You know what so doesn't make sense about the news right now? Office vacancy is at an all time high in the San Francisco Bay Area, but home prices are at an all time high. Who the hell is buying all these house and driving the prices up? It can't be people who are actually working because there are too many empty offices spaces which means people aren't working and probably can't afford a house.

Personally, I think it's all some huge hype by the residential real estate industry so that home prices don't go the way of commercial real estate. Commercial real estate prices are at 95 levels. Something is very wrong. But if someone is hyping the market, then they need to be careful because too many reports about the high price of real estate will have people fleeing the SF Bay Area region in droves, if they haven't already left. Just like they did in LA a few years ago. And then watch out. My prediction is housing prices will fall below 95 levels and then well, the area is going to be screwed for awhile and this recession that the media is trying to say is leaving us, will be around for much longer, way longer.

Ken Caminiti, that baseball player who Sports Illustrated did an interview with on the use of steroids in major league baseball, is being interviewed on The Jim Rome Show now. Ken said that SI just wanted to interview him about life after baseball and he wasn't expecting the interview to be about steroid use in sports. SI just asked him the questions and he decided to be honest. On reflection he said that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't have agreed to do the interview.

Did SI do a bad thing and fool him? It's causing such a scandal now in all the papers. That and Canseco saying on The Last Word, Jim's TV show on Fox Sports, that about 80% of pro players are on the juice. Plus Barry Bonds saying it's none of anybody's business isn't helping.

There's been talk about steroids in major league baseball for years. Hockey and baseball are the only professional sports that don't test for drug use. Why? Football and basketball do it. What's the big deal? They do it in the Olympics.

Caminiti said his testosterone level is below 200. For the average man his age, his testosterone level should be at 500-700. He said he has to take artificial testosterone now because his body doesn't produce much of its own. I wonder what this means when a man's testosterone's level falls below its normal levels. Some guy called Rome and said that he took steroids to try to get into the Olympics and because his testosterone levels were so low, he hasn't been able to make love to his wife for years. That guy who called in sounded really broken up.

Even Caminiti sounded so confused and upset in the interview with Rome. I felt sorry for him because it sounded like the steroids really had a bad effect on his life and his health. Where this will all lead is anyone's guess. The baseball players' union will never agree to drug testing and unless fans demand it or it hits the team's bottom line in the form of ticket sales, the owners and the players will just look the other way. Until, there's a Lyle Alzado incident in major league baseball and by that time, who knows how many players from the pros on down through the high school levels will be damaged by their steroid use.

Wow, it's been awhile, so let's catch up.

I saw Monsoon Wedding on Monday at the Embarcadero Cinema with a friend of mine. We thought it wouldn't be crowded but the theatre was packed. God, I loved the movie. It made me think of my hindu indian days with my bindis and saris and punjabi outfit and my hair down to my butt. I forgot how much indian people love marigolds.

The movie was so well written and so universal even though it took place a world away in New Dehli. The family could have been any family preparing for a daughter's wedding. I loved the extended family scene because my family used to be like that when I was little, before everyone scattered and went their separate ways.

Then of course since we saw an indian movie, we had to go eat indian food at Gaylord's, which was right across the way. I don't remember ever eating, even though I'm sure I have. The food was good though, very good.

On Wednesday, my Palm Vx arrived so I've been spending my nights cruising the Net for applications to add to my Palm. After loading half a dozen apps, I decided that Handango was a good app to get so I bought it. It's a simple database application, where you can make up databases yourself for things you want to track. That's why I bought the Palm anyway, so I could track things better and not have two or three Hello Kitty notebooks in my purse.

I'm sure there are alot of other good apps out there that people have builty specifically for the Palm, but you have to pay for it and I'm like, NO WAY, I am not paying. Even Palm Quicken cost $40, like OH MY GOD, how expensive. Most the trial databases I loaded, I totally hated anyway. I paid $30 for Handango, but at least I can build databases my way. I used to build database apps for a living, so it's not like I don't know what I'm doing.

These are the things I want to track on my Palm.

Book to buy or read or both
Expenses - cash, ATM, check and credit card transactions
Things to buy other than books
CDs to Buy
Movies I’ve seen/rented
Plays I’ve seen rented
Grocery List - things I need to buy for the house
Wines to Buy
And NOTES - notes about things I want to remember.

I even found a palm app to write stories with and a story board for movies. I think I might just build my own apps though. I'm thinking I could build a Palm App to mimic a screenplay spine and a conflict matrix. I bet I could even build a palm app to track projects I'm working on, since I haven't seen a project tracking database for Palm that I really like.

The hardest thing now is transferring all the information from my other books to the Palm. This process is going to take about a month or so I think. I tempted to always carry a little Hello Kitty book though, but I know if I do that, I'll start using it instead of the Palm and I want to give the Palm a fair chance to work in my life. I'm even thinking of naming the Palm and calling him Morris the Palm, but I think Morris is too casual of a name. My Palm is more like a butler type dude so he needs a butler type dude name like Mr. Harry, Mr. Henry, Mr. Blakefield, mister somebody. I should just wait till my palm tells me his name. I'm sure he has a name and it's an english name too, because aren't all butlers English?

What else? I'm listening to Jim Rome and his take on the steroid scandal in baseball and the threat of a baseball stoppage. Then there's all this talk about the LA Lakers and the Sacremento Kings. I like the Lakers but they've already won two or three championships under Phil Jackson. It would be nice to see somebody else win for once. I mean the Lakers and becoming like the Yankees, like an automatic to win because of their talent and their payroll. The Sacramento Kings is a small market team in a no name town with probably half or less than half the payroll of the Lakers. At least this series has made NBA basketball interesting. It's not about doing the dunks anymore, but more like college. It's all about defense and making those 25 ft 3 point jumpers from the field. All that dunking was making basketball so boring because alot of the shotmaking was happening under the basket where it's hard for a fan to see because all the players are in the way.

What else? I think after all these years I've finally decided what kind of guy I want in my life. At least for the first time in my life, I've been able to finally formulate what kind of guy I really want. At least for now. And it's a surprise too because it's not the type of guy I ever thought I wanted or needed. I'm still processing it all because I only came up with the definition yesterday and I think it's still subject to change because it's so new and different, different from the kind of guy I've been dating and falling in love with all these years. It's not like this type of guy hasn't been in my life, because he has, I just didn't know this was the kind of guy I wanted. And there is even a guy like this in my life, who's almost perfect, but not quite.

One thing is clear, I want the guy I eventually marry to know deep in his bones, his heart, his soul, his body and his mind, that I'm the one. Anything else is unacceptable, which is why the current guy in my life, although he's damn close to perfect as I've ever seen in a man, isn't the one for me. He doesn't think I'm the one or at least he doesn't act like it, so although I wouldn't mind hooking up with him, I won't do it beacuse it would be a waste of both of our times. Besides, I like him too much to just date him knowing it wouldn't be permanent. To date knowing you're just going to break up is mean to me and although I've done it in the past, it's always been messy for me and the guy and I usually end up with some guy telling me "you ripped my heart out" and me staring blankly at him, because it's not like I meant to, I just knew it wouldn't be permanent. And that's the mean thing I guess, because I knew the relationship had a expiration date like milk. It's such bad karma on my part and I think I've been paying for this nasty behaviour in the last few years.

I'm still reeling from seeing Michel Tremblay's "For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again." The play was uneven but funny as heck and much to my surprise, I cried during the last scene. The play is about Tremblay's homage to his mother, a typical crazy mother type.

There was something about that last scene, where the mother comes in dressed in a nightgown and says to the son something like "You'll take of your father when I'm gone." Olympia Dukakis managed to convey so much in that one line. Right away I knew that the mother was dying and the sentiment of her line made me cry. I didn't cry during the whole scene, the middle portion was a little boring, but I cried at the end when the mother takes off in a basket up into the sky.

And I was in awe. I wish I could write lines like that where I could make someone like myself in the audience, a person that doesn't cry easily, cry like a baby. Especially about such an intense subject like a parent dying. I want to add killer crying lines like that to my baseball screenplay.

I am itching to rewrite it but I promised I would wait a month before doing it. Perhaps it was good advice because now that I've seen this play, I want to take what I've learned from watching this play and translate it back to my screenplay.

I don't think I show enough love between the prodigal son and the father during the screenplay. I show alot of the bitterness between the two but not enough of the love. Watching Tremblay's play taught me that.