Excuse: It was a late night!

Well, last night we went to Jack London Square to The Fat Lady for dinner and then to Yoshi's to see Keiko Matsui. I was up until nearly 3am and I have no idea what I'm doing up so early now, but I'm a little out of it.

The Fat Lady was pretty nice. We were there before just to sit at the bar and have wine and I think we had dessert but I can't actually remember what it was so maybe I just imagined that part? Nono, I'm sure we had dessert because it was after we went to the Parkway Speakeasy Movie Theater and we didn't have dessert there and what is life without dessert? But I digress. The food at The Fat Lady was good. It was above average, but not the best meal ever. Same with the wine, even though we had cabernet which is generally my favorite, in this case I might have liked something else better. I had the mushroom risotto, and I will say that risotto is pretty easy to screw up and they really got it right. Dessert was not that memorable, so I guess that is right in line with my non-memory of dessert from the time before. Wild Horse and Hot Goat...that's all you need to know about dinner!

Damn, it's hard to concentrate and type with all these shoutouts whizzing across the top of the page. Are they always so annoying?

So then on to Yoshi's for Keiko and her supporting musicians. Both places were sooo crowded last night, but Yoshi's has a line for everything, so no worries! It's organized chaos. Or something. We had really great seats...there was one guy sitting in front of us that I might argue had a better seat than us, but really by some fluke ours were really, really great. Keiko uses both a baby grand piano and a set of keyboards, and we were very close to the stage halfway between these two sets of instruments. We were also directly in front of the horn player, who was awesome. I think many of the people in the audience were there just to see him.

I don't always like jazz, sometimes it sounds really discordant to me. Now my opinion has changed somewhat. I do think it can sometimes simply BE discordant just because it isn't the best jazz, but I'm more inclined to think you just need near-perfect accoustics or a really good home sound system. I'm really more of a noisy alternative rock and "other" music type person, but I could definitely listen to some more Keiko Matsumi! She was so cute, too, introducing each song and telling a little story and acting all shy with her halting english and you just have to think...she has been performing for over 20 years, she can't really be that shy! Our great seats and the great performance made me think about this book I've been listening to called "Stumbling on Happiness", which is about how our brains work, and I remembered what the author said about how once we have a really great experience in a particular situation, we will be dissapointed if we put ourselves in that same situation and the experience isn't quite as good. So for instance, if I go back to see Keiko Matsui at Yoshi's again someday and the seats aren't as good and maybe the perfomance seems a little off or the backup musicians aren't as good or somebody is coughing in the room or the wine isn't that great...my brain will perceive it as a big letdown.

Ugh, speaking of letdowns...I had several rather large chargebacks this morning. That always sucks. People buy credits from me and then...I don't know, mommy and daddy refuse the credit card charges or who knows what happens and then I'm out the money (and the credits.) The only satisfaction I get is that IMVU shuts down their account. NOT what I like to wake up to and now I'm feeling very poor! I think I'll play a game I like to call "how long can you go without spending a penny".