Repaintings, of both personal and artistic natures
My friend Michelle and I finally found the perfect place in San Francisco to run: Glen Park. My absolute favorite aspect of big, urban cities is discovering those hidden, quiet nooks where green things live, and where it is possible to stop and hear the movement of leaves in the trees overhead. Glen Park starts in the low belly of a canyon below Twin Peaks, and winds uphill into a sweet little housing development with impressive views of the Bay. I had one of those desperately-needed, definitely valid moments of perspective when I skipped up the side of the hill to Michael Jackson, head bent in the wind. And then I turned around, met by the verdant valley below and the incoming loll of clouds. Peace might feel momentary sometimes, and yet like so many things, we only realize its value when it seems we've lost it entirely.
My days are no longer spent behind an espresso bar, nor inside a women's museum covered in images and sound bites of women I'd like to one day meet. Instead, I feel responsible when I open the doors to our fifth-floor international school. I'm learning "Kongrish," the patronizingly slow, noun-noun-verb rhythm of English / Chinese. I've taught a few grammar skills and conversation classes to students from Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Korea, Thailand. I've learned a few words in other languages ("Merhaba" - "hello" in Turkish), and lead tours of North Beach, the Legion of Honor and the Wharf. I organized a soccer game at Golden Gate with about 25 students, and was the only woman to play. I had to halt the game a few times to repeat: "Remember: English is our common language. No cheating!" when the guys started yelling field instructions in French and Korean. We had to discuss indirect objects when one student, who has a more complicated name but goes by "Phil," kept yelling: "Kick me! Kick me!" (Meaning, of course, "kick it to me.")
The best part of the day is 3 pm, when I bike up Market home and put on my running shorts. My calves are getting so strong and powerful. I've joined a writing group here and there. My dear Moroccan friend Hasna and I meet up once a week at a little truffle shop in North Beach called "XOX" where a Frenchman named Jean-Marc sells handmade chocolates free with coffee. I've gotten to see my family rather frequently.
Last weekend I attended a particularly fascinating family reunion. In a way, it was two reunions squeezed into one. It all started with a single painting of a eucalyptus tree bent in the wind, about 4 feet long, painted on silk in 1942 by Chiura Obata. This Japanese-born art professor at Cal was my grandfather Leahn's mentor in college when he received the notice that he and his family had to leave their home. At the same time that my grandparents' families were being scattered across Eastern Europe in labor camps, Obata and his family had to clean out their rental and squish their valuables into one piece of luggage apiece.
Obata's daughter, Haruka, was there on Saturday when the painting, which my parents recently had renovated by an expert Japanese conservator named Tomakatsu, was unveiled at his studio.
"Mom was mad because he wouldn't help us pack," she said, eyes drawn to the painting, whose emotion is powerfully conveyed. "He was painting this when we left."
Sixty years later, my mother gathered us all in Tomakatsu's sunny backyard, where my grandmother (the current owner of the painting), aunts, uncles, cousins and friends all came to honor art in its most human form. I felt like I was getting to know the grandfather I've never met, while deepening a family bond that began with the stroke of a brush during an intolerable time of American history.
It's springtime in California, and while things are blooming everywhere outside and inside me. I am ready to grab inspiration by its reigns, to apply for graduate school in earnest, to learn what business casual really means, to truly clean my room, to act my age, whatever age that might be.
Bay to Breakers this weekend--which means that my Glen Park runs just might prepare me for that 11% Steiner grade. Who knows--possibility is in the air. The presidential primaries are never ending. 2008 is unpredictable, but that can be a good thing.
A Song for San Francisco
and now, for something more positive...
oh you gorgeous churrerias
china bizarre bazaars
you hipsters with dark blue black hair
surprising jewelry and metrosexual gestures
you smelly sidewalks, you crisp suits
you Birkenstocks with socks
you MUNI buses with sighing tires
you Japanese potatoes blushing maroon
you little Nicaraguan ladies selling churros
street florists, high-heeled high-strung
women in Clydesdale boots whinnying on bluetooths
old men yawning on the corner of Market and Ninth
exhaling carbon dioxide tainted
by years of foreign chemicals
All of you, you Alvin Aileys and Martha Grahams,
you Allen Ginsbergs and Cherrie Moragas,
ever last parrot of Telegraph Hill,
all you ambassadors, diplomats and bureaucrats,
you San Franciscans,
you are every bit me as I am you.
Spectrums and nefarious fiends recording
a notable comedy inside supernatural communities Oh!
San Francisco, you build us up
and break us down.
Thank goodness.
Write about small regrets.
(a lunchtime prompt, written at Philz Coffee on a balmy Saturday afternoon with a cup of Istanbul tea)
I immediately regretted what I'd said about the governor. It wasn't really consequential, and it was meant to be dismissive, which might be why it backfired so badly. Lindsay and I were walking down Valencia en route to a Bikram yoga class, and the day was just too bright for comfort. An ambiguously young, ambiguously ambivalent black man approached me from the left, with that half-smirk half-pout on his face like he either wanted to sell me a bootlegged Mariah Carey album or grab my spandexed ass.
"Hey lady, what do you think about the Governator?" He looked at me full in the face, which was a feat considering I was so focused on the asphalt. There was a weed there, so hidden, so crushed. The weed and I shared a moment of secret sympathy.
"He's not my favorite," I said weakly. The weed cringed. Lindsay sent me a sidelong glance thirty seconds too late.
"Me neither, me neither," the man said, gaining momentum. "Wanna help the economy and give me a dollar?"
I quickened my pace, tried to let my feet respond for me. "Sorry man, I don't have anything." It sounded so pathetic, so practiced. The irony was that although it came out like a stock lie, it was absolutely true. I was lucky I had a MUNI pass, because otherwise there wasn't a cent on me.
Before he responded, I could hear his blood rising up his head, mercury rising like a pressure-cooked thermometer on a steely July day. Lindsay and I tried walking faster in that way that hopefully didn't look nervous. And then, his temperature ran high, and the litany began:
"Shut the **** up, you mother****ing, ****sucking white-ass bitch! "
I felt his spit. My cheeks flushed an embarrassing pink. He took a deep breath with the expertise of a diver; those lungs were powerful.
"You stay the FUCK outta my hood, you little slut! You get your ass to South Central and I'll put a mother****ing gun to your HEAD! I'll kick your ass so hard it'll go up your *****!"
At this last remark, I felt an inner crumbling. All those carefully constructed, politically correct terms that I filled my life with were no match for this game. It wasn't even the vulgarity that hit me; it was a visceral, palpable awareness that a complete stranger hated me, or people like me, or people who he thought I was like. I'm not so naive to think that this particular monologue was all about me, and who I am, and I'm also not so young to never be approached by an unfriendly stranger, but this -- this was weighty. He might as well have socked me in the gut. Shame is a perpetuating wound.
It struck me how the clear reaction on the street was not sympathy, nor even horror or surprise at his impromptu delivery; instead what I observed was almost a macabre interest. Men and women of all colors and ages walked by, and the look on their faces was unmistakable: What did this skinny white girl do to warrant such an emphatic reaction?
The words carried across the street, and even when we had crossed Valencia and wandered into a nearby side street, I could still feel the heat of his venom.
"Are you all right?" Lindsay asked, and I knew she must have been watching my jaw clench and my fingers tighten on my sports bag. I felt all at once a person defined (and perhaps defied) by color. Flush cheeks. Tapping pale fingers. The sliver of a pink belly just barely peeking above my exercise pants (the ones from an Isla Vista free box, with the ugly hole over the right knee where I had fallen during a 5K race in Spain).
"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, although for the first time that day I was really lying. "That man has got bigger problems than the governor, though."
She laughed weakly, and I knew all at once that we were both feeling that paper-thin self-consciousness that is race in California, the cruel ****tail that is white guilt and privilege, the impulse to fill oneself with politically-correct jargon while understanding the complexity of being human and functional during an economic recession. All of these worlds swirled inside my pink belly while my white knuckles clenched and relaxed in time with my pulse, that hyperactive little red organ. The nausea was suddenly overwhelming. I wanted to say all this out loud, and I think Lindsay might have too, but instead I said:
"This is my neighborhood too."
And she nodded noiselessly while we walked an alternate route to the yoga studio. I kept my eyes on the ground, but there were no more weeds.
Fiery Furnaces
It's been a long time since I wrote a poem. Poetry is my dental floss. Sometimes I don't think to do it, sometimes it lingers in the back of my mind like dinnertime corn on the cob. Sometimes when I finally sit myself down to do it, I can't help feeling clean and refreshed. It's a good way to unclutter myself.
I'd like to try what I call a Frank O'Hara sample: enjambed sentences and completely arbitrary references that somehow make you feel all right inside. Easy Tuesday evening with the sun already down, here I go:
i passed three fires in four
days passing by all orange with smoky
edges flicking up buildings like a lady's skirt
around it, eyes closed, ducking below
ladders while crossing kearny in early morning
first fire above an irish bar on a day for green
saints soaring above valencia street windows
browning like a summer tan as sixty apartments
ejected residents with almost festive force
i chopped onions while heather read thirty second
headlines - "helicopters relieve tenants."
they circled as flies do before decayed
dinner burning.
the biggest remnant of fire two
days after i started work my new
colleague walked in smelling of ash-
en face after an evening fanning flames
i misunderstood his jacket for someone else's
cinderblock microwave lunch
"do we have a toaster?" i wondered
"i'm done toasting," he said.
third fire early morning
fog lifting and an isoceles triangle
lit up firemen as they climbed
fire escapes with bathrobed women
standing on shoddy patios
built in nineteen twenty something
and i am something twenty-
fires later and i remember
jack gilbert's great fires
blooming early spring over the city
lights gleaming.
On Saints
There are some impulses I've learned not to ignore. Smiling at old women. Stopping to pet a friendly cat. Calling my parents when I'm tired and know no one else wants to know why. And on nights like tonight, blind baking. Trusting that what I want to eat will arise from a bowl full of unmeasured dry ingredients, and loving the smell the oven makes when sugar melts.
Tonight Michelle and I went to the Community Music Center in the Mission for the All Saints of the City of Angels book signing. We wandered into a small auditorium of what looked like an old church, stepping off a notoriously iffy San Francisco street and into this homey, bubbling hubbub of Spanglish, silk screens and sangria. I felt like I had accidentally wandered into the family reunion of a clan I didn't realize I belonged to. Most people were speaking Spanish, and at least a quarter of the people in the room carried some kind of instrument, usually some variation of guitar or mandolin. There were lots of seniors with shawls and wise smiles, and just as many short Latino men with long, bound hair.
A young man from Guadalajara stepped up to the microphone with the guitar, which was almost as big as he was, and sang a ballad about Mexican unions. SIndicados. I kept superimposing his face with that of an old guitarrista from Malaga who used to sing canciones at midnight at a tapas bar just minutes from my Fuengirola apartment. There is something about speaking and living in another language that provides the most refreshing escape--tonight I felt like I had slipped into a wormhole, and that instead of being surrounded by people, all I could feel and hear were adjectives and nouns, and that creative way that verbs wound around them. It was a linguistic transcendence, one that might otherwise be attributed to wine-soaked fruit floating in plastic cups of sangria, or that hyper spring evening sensation when the light is just too nice to believe in.
Spring brings the most unoriginal and comforting signs of renewal. Sometimes I wonder if I should be a pagan, or some other earth worshiper. What do I worship? I worship running in the rain, unexpected compliments and that intangible, unutterable link between people who feel linked. I miss that sometimes, and expect it at others.
There's more to say -- a new job, a newer perspective -- but that might have to wait for more profound moments, when I've found my saints.
Sick Bear
Sometimes it takes digging to the bottom to see all the way up.
On Sunday night my body took an interesting, culinary nosedive. My weekend had been pleasant enough, starting with an amazing snapshot into the San Francisco art scene at Friday's Monster Drawing Rally at the Verdi Club (imagine an auction room filled with dozens of artists drawing right in front of you), and a good dozen hours of latte-making while the Chinese New Year Parade zoomed down Kearny Street in the rain. And then my parents came by the shop just as I got off on Sunday afternoon, and we wandered through Chinatown to eat dinner in North Beach.
Somewhere between two slices of margherita pizza and a half glass of cheap red wine in the comfort of my own home, I got sick. I'm not sure exactly what precipitated it, if it were four months of more or less nonstop work, several weeks of GRE cramming, two weeks of job interviews and a suddenly interesting social life thrown in for good measure, but my body was more or less overtaken by some subterranean force. I went to bed, then woke up, vomited, went back to bed, woke up with low blood sugar, and the evening more or less spiraled downward from there.
The trickiest part of being a type 1 diabetic is the need for constant chemical balance. When I get sick, my internal balance, which is generally a preciously-measured ratio of insulin to food, is thrown for a loop. Just when I was having the hardest time keeping fluids down, my body was demanding a greater intake of sugar. And thus began a miserable cycle.
It's funny how in these moments of absolute physical and emotional humility, the basic truths of our life are apparent. Within an hour I was attended to by my roommates. In my ornery low blood sugar haze, I tried to brush them back to bed, but then Erin said:
"We're not going anywhere until your blood sugar is normal."
And I resigned a bit, let them set up a makeshift bed for me in our living room, and laid down, shivering and testing and testing and testing my blood sugar. And it just kept dropping; my body felt like it had been left on a bad amusement park ride too long. All I wanted to do was sleep.
What happens to people when they are reduced to their most basic functions?
I called my friend Mary, who is an amazing friend and resource, and we agreed that I should take Glucagon, a powerful anti-insulin hormone reserved for emergency lows. I'd never done it before, and was always so proud of that fact. What we call our bodies is what we call ourselves, and at my most private, I always felt that good blood sugar control was somehow indicative of good moral character.
Well, sometimes shit just happens.
There is a random nature to the universe that has always fascinated me, in that same way that Greek tragedy must fascinate historians, or tsunamis must occupy geologists. There is an innate sense of the undetermined that rules us all to some point, I think. Empowerment is an incredible sensation, because in the end it is exactly that--the feeling we get when we can harness that which we can control.
End of story: my blood sugar did indeed raise to healthy level, and I slept most of the next day. I was such low energy, however, that even the thought of getting up to turn on the lights seemed distant. My dad ended up driving into town to spend the night, and it reminded me of sick days when I was in elementary school, and my mom would let me watch Courduroy the Bear and drink soup from a mug.
Sometimes, when we can't justify a day of rest, our bodies make it happen in whatever ways they can. In my case, it was exacerbated by a body that has always been a bit rebellious.
On Sunday, shortly before I fell ill, I was watching a film for the museum called "Women of Tibet." It narrated the stories of several Tibetan women who had survived the Chinese occupation, some of them imprisoned for as much as 30 years for simply expressing dissent. Last night, lying on our sofa listening to This American Life, I remembered how happy they looked when they were released.
"I'm really glad I wasn't born in Tibet," I said to Erin. "They were imprisoned for so long."
"Yeah," she said in that way that seems all-too-wise, "but we all have our own prisons."
I feel better now, and I can't stop smiling.
My Toy Drum
Hot Chip is a British band that sounds like the rhythmic clicking of sneakers acccompanied by a monkey hitting a toy drum. Which is why I like them. There is a YouTube video of their single "Over and Over," in which the musicians bump around a yellow room while singing about the "smell of repetition." Sometimes, songs just mirror life.
In some ways, life in San Francisco can never be the same thing two days in a row, or even two hours in a row. I feel the tugs of social activism (the persistent tablers at the end of BART stations), the draw of underground music (flyers snuck under business doors or stapled on telephone poles between bus stops), and the incessant chirp of my own persistent search for a meaningful career.
A list of random things in the world:
Fidel Castro has resigned
Kosovo is now an independent country
The Grateful Dead are rocking (and campaigning) for Obama
Persepolis, a film by Marjane Sartrapi (one of my personal heroes), has been nominated for an Academy Award
Somewhere, right now, someone might be falling in love. Or out.
Me? I've had three job interviews this week (one "call-back" tomorrow!), and will be interviewing Sean Busby for Diabetes Health Magazine tomorrow. Sean is my age, a type 1 diabetic since age 19, professional snowboarder and the creator of Riding on Insulin, a snowboarding camp for diabetics.
My life has become the motion between a monkey and its cymbals. I am drawn to many places, to many ideas, to many people, to many conclusions. The roots that ground me down are my family, my housemates, the view from Dolores Park, the promise of something more intellectually stimulating, the blank slate that is my future. I daydream about traveling, about direction handed to me on a silver platter, about the day I no longer have to wear an insulin pump. I make dinners for my housemates (tonight it was grilled portobello mushrooms baked with cheese and spinach), run when I can, bike down Market and scribble imaginary thoughts and cursory dreams onto little notes that spread throughout my room. What I want what I want what I want what I dream what I dream what I dream, the rhythm of other languages I've heard or spoken, the way boys purse their lips on public transportation, what it takes to be taken seriously, whatever that even means.
Writing has been and always be the one creative constant in my life. There is a release I get from touching finger to key that it is nearly impossible to replicate. Sometimes I can't even anticipate what it will be about. Maybe it's not even about anything; maybe it's about that gauzy moment between thoughts just as they form. Maybe it's a meditative practice, the repetitve sound of nail against keyboard. Does it really matter if people pay me to repeat the pattern?
One of my coworkers is a stage manager. Last week (Valentine's Day, actually), I went to see her production of "Gone" by Charles Mee. The theatre space was small, and populated with an eclectic assortment of doors and lamps. The entire play (I later learned) is a series of found articles, monologues, blogs, and essays, all exploring the theme of loss, transience. It reminded me of Robert Altman's "Shortcuts," and the choppy transition between Raymond Carver stories that was later revealed as so precious. I will always love the questions that good writing brings. It brings me images of holding something intangible in the air between me and someone else; a character, a director, an audience. What happens when an idea goes beyond being just that--something you can actually hold?
I write what I write when I can, when I have an evening off (rare these days). My dream now is to keep my mind open, available, interested. There's something inside I still need to kindle, and I'm not even sure what to call it yet. These days of being an adult fascinate me because they are so unpredictable--I find myself wondering, just what am I capable of? What is inside me? A novel? A poem? A teacher? A busines woman?
I write now, and yet on many nights I just find myself crashing into sleep, dreaming of Hot Chip monkeys and all the little stories I found on the bike ride home. Ah, the smell of repetition.
What I Want For Dinner
You look up in the elevator and see a story peering down on your head. Cue "Bewilderbeast" by Badly Drawn Boy, paint a mahogany skyline at five o'clock, bicycle down Market Street and see the characters as they zip in and out of your little world. Surrounded by stories, you are, and you want to reach out and grab them like they were little red apples.
You think about pastry excesses in coffee shops and the inordinate amount of homeless people that dance, sing, beg, read the newspapers, pick through garbage, and tote around shopping carts full of soda cans, all on the sidewalk outside your work. You wonder what is it about their lives that makes them different from you--were they breastfed? Are their friends imaginary? Did the government screw them over? Are they literate? Is it bad to think of them as "they?" What if they are all walking, talking geniuses hidden inside burlap coats?
You see cyclists in tight black jeans with little U-locks wedged into the backs of their boxer briefs on their way to work. Everything they wear is carefully mismatched, hand-dyed or drenched in sarcasm. The world lives and breathes on iPods, iPhones, iMacs, iDunnos.
You follow the news like you are the slowest competitor in a race, trying to size up your allies and opponents as they zip past you on fast-forward. You are reminded of the cities just beyond your reach, of places where people don't spend ten hours a day on the Internet, maybe don't even use a computer. You know, deep in your bones like Anne Frank, that you are the same as everyone, your bone marrow is just as dark and your skin requires the same vitamin D, and you realize that every day you spend in this city, you are member to an infinite universe of oneness. It's a oneness that is abrupt or abrasive at times, like when an old black man yells GET OUT THE WAY BITCH as he jaywalks through the intersection, or when your gay colleague jokes about how much he can't stand dykes ("because they like heavy shoes and wicker baskets," he says, and when you tell him that some of your best friends are lesbians, his reply is: "that's why they're your best friends, and not mine"), and the inherent hypocrisy of everything that is human is thrown at you every day. Somehow, somehwere, that constant in-your-face imperfection settles you down a bit, because the more obvious it is, the more obvious your response becomes.
You look for stories around you. Sometimes you find it in animals: the colony of green parrots that populate Telegraph Hill, yukking it up in the trees like your extended family on parade. Sometimes you find it in artwork: little alleys and gullies with murals of indigenous figures, of Che Guevera and Martin Luther King, of the Aztec calendar emblazoned big and bold at the City College's tile facade. You grovel for stories, you stick your shoe in them and worm around, you listen for them as they waft out of train stations and through bar walls. You avoid love because you know it eludes you, and you've accepted that for the time being, because you know love is too cliche, too grandiose for the stories you crave. You don't want anything handed to you in a silver spoon, but it'd be all right if they were served with vegan cookies.
All this, passing through your mind on your way home. The light is more perfect than you imagine heaven being. A black cat named Milo waits at your door. An old man named Michael sits in your coffeeshop talking to an invisible government spy, and when you offer him chocolate croissants, he interrupts himself to accept. Stories gather in your mind like stormclouds and you are waiting for that lightning strike to happen. Is this what happens when you let your mind stew?
You stop. Blink. Open your door. Pick up your pen, introduce yourself to it, and have the story for dinner.
Yogic Montages
Last night I did yoga in the middle of my bedroom while the sun set outside. I had missed my class and was too tired after a seven hour shift to bike back down through Mission. I have taken different variations of yoga over the last few years, and usually feel a bit self conscious because I am not a flexible person, nor have I ever truly prescribed to Eastern meditation-inspired spirituality. But lately...maybe it's the sudden change in the air, maybe it's the promise of a new political agenda, maybe it's a personal renewal I am still trying to define, but my muscles seem to listen to me more these days.
This always happens to me when I don't write regularly. The first sentence is the hardest, and then suddenly my fingers find all their old grooves on the keys and adrenaline is renewed. There is a backlog of subjects I want to dissect, and mysterious and/or non sequitur current events. Among them:
1) The Animal-Farm-esque mauling of a San Jose teenager at the San Francisco by a Siberian tiger on Christmas Day. Doesn't that seem like something out of Vonnegut? Weeks later, after police investigation has just barely skimmed the surface, the San Francisco Chronicle's headline portrayed a polar bear's attempted escape. These animals are way too smart for cages. Tragedy gets weirder and weirder every year.
2) The constant, ever-present loom of the presidential primaries. The difference this year, however, is that the candidates we have feel viable, despite their historic significance, and that we as the public are damned ready for change. I don't have much time until the February 5 California primary, but I do like the feeling of choosing between people who might actually empower.*
3) Schwarzenegger's forecast for budget cuts. The further I get from college, the more it becomes clear to me how much money runs us. Capitalism really is designed to profit some, and screw others. The irony of it blinds me sometimes--at my grandmother's house, with her wall full of Socialist publications from the 1940s and the photographs of her various blacklisted brothers. It's striking how the very idea of something--shared power, perhaps, or communal effort--can be considered a threat to the general public.
4) Persepolis. An amazing graphic novel by Iranian-born, European-educated Marjane Sartrapi (one of my personal heroes), now turned animated film. I have yet to see it, but once I can afford a movie ticket, there'll be a review here.
Last night while stretching, I had a sudden technicolor image: It was that familiar blurry montage from any bad sports/competition-themed film where the protagonist discovers his/her challenge, and resolves to achieve a certain goal. When I was a little girl it was the Mighty Ducks hockey movies, or Hoosiers or most any football movie on ABC during the holidays. You know the moment I am talking about--three to six months of running, crunches, strategic study and coached practice is shown in a thirty-second flurry of sweaty images, and suddenly the overweight or under-represented hero is an unstoppable machine. I mention this now because it never truly hit me how much of that growth just zips by on a screen. My life right now are those thirty seconds of effort, study, practice and insanity, with no promised result or goal, but little darting carrots at the end of a string.
I guess that's why I do yoga.
*As far as women leaders go: I had to research Victoria Woodhull, the first American woman to run for president, for my internship at the International Museum of Women. She ran for the Equal Labor Party fifty years before women even had the right to vote--1872. We're talking Antebellum, we're talking stuffy white men who accused her of being a prostitute because she advocated on a platform of Spiritualist free love and was one of the first woman stockbrokers in the U.S. She and her sister Tennie Claflin started their own publishing company and were one of the first to publish Marx's Communist Manifesto. (Full circle, eh?) Woodhull's chosen vice presidential candidate? Frederick Douglass.
Can you just imagine the turn our country would have taken if she had won?
Holiday Thoughts
Johnny Cash is playing in the living room. My roommates finally set up our record player and now the house is fuller somehow, charged with energy. Two-thousand-seven is streaming by like a live wire, landmarks flipping past me as I bike through Golden Gate Park or down to the Embarcadero, where craftsmen and women set up shop and the bridge looms like a silent siren.
A Siberian tiger killed a nineteen-year-old boy on Christmas Day.
The Pakistani Prime Minister (who is, incidentally, a woman) was assassinated.
Oprah Winfrey has officially endorsed Barack Obama as a Democratic candidate for president.
Global warming is real.
Somehow the world keeps spinning, revolving on an axis that seems a bit more twisted every year. That same alternative perspective is the one that rules San Francisco, the book of unwritten rules that makes everything artsy normal, and everything conventional absurd. When I serve coffee, I am usually more surprised when our patrons don't have multiple facial piercings or some prominent physical/personality characteristic that is immediately obvious. Subtlety is hard to find here.
My life has been a cross-section of multiple jobs and overlapping friends and family. Last Friday, I accompanied some friends to see the Gay and Lesbian Choir of San Francisco's Christmas "Crap-Array," a fun parody of holiday carols. The best song, by far, was when the conductor lead the entire chorus onstage and they all pulled out different singing toys--some of them sang nasal carols when pushed, some of them nodded their doggy heads sympathetically or flopped their ears up and down. The best was the rapping penguin with square red glasses that kept bumping its beat long after the conductor had laid down her wand.
Saturday night I enjoyed my second Fillmore experience in two weeks--the week prior, Erin and I scored tickets to see the Greyboy Allstars, a funk band that boasts five-minute sax solos. This time, some college friends joined me at the Blackalicious concert, a hip hop fiesta that lit up under those famous swaying chandeliers, glowing a soft purple in the winter light. Wandering through that incredible auditorium is a trip through anyone's top ten lists, with concert posters wallpapering every available surface, cozy little bars and funky ambiance. I felt like I was wandering into a peak at my parents' adolescence.
With the end of one year begins the hopes of the next: I've just begun yet another internship, dropping an otherwise unfulfilling editorial internship for an exhibitions assistantship at the International Museum of Women (www.imow.org), where I'm helping with the upcoming Women, Power and Politics exhibit. I've only worked there about four days, and already I feel like I've been educated in ways I would have never expected. Did you know that if (and that's a big if) Hillary Clinton were elected president, we would be the 84th country in the world to have a female president or prime minister? An interesting statistic, considering the latest news in Pakistan, but still...it really makes you reevaluate American policy, doesn't it? Why does it have to be so revolutionary to be a woman in power?
This internship has already had me questioning my own gender identity politics--I've never considered myself a "woman in power," but am proud of my own, self-assessed empowerment. IMOW's previous exhibit, Imagining Ourselves, asked Generation X and Y women to define their generations. Many women artists from around the world submitted photograph portraits, each holding a sign with the one word they felt best described themselves and/or their generation. My team member asked me to participate, so I got Erin to take a picture of me with the sign "multi." Multi-tasking, multilingual, multicultural, multi-talented, multi-everything. The inclusiveness of modern media overwhelms me sometimes, but it also best describes my efforts to exist fully.
It makes you think, though, doesn't it: how is our world evolving? What will our reality be, one year from now? Will these ideas seem sentimental, preachy, or tragically true?
Feliz Ano Nuevo...almost.
On Climate Change
Sometimes, just when I least expect it, my climate turns. And by climate I'm not referring to crisper air or redder leaves; I mean how many revolutions of my bicycle wheel it takes me to get up the hill, or how many times I test my blood sugar in a twelve-hour period. It's all in the way I view a ten-hour's day of work (as either inspiring or perspiring), or what adjective first pops up when I see myself in the mirror in the early morning.
Things are changing, and not just in my life. Al Gore stepped up to the plate in Bali and accepted a Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Oprah has officially endorsed Barack Obama for president. It has been legally decided that states can create their own climate control legislature, which could indicate a change in air quality and fuel-efficient vehicles.
My fourth-grade teacher, who was unconventional in her day by insisting that we all call her by her first name (Flo), used to make us repeat the same three-letter mantra every day: Attitude is everything. It took me most of that year to really understand what she meant by that. I stopped being an idealist one rainy day in February 2001, when I became diabetic, but in a way that day was the first one I really took those words to heart. Maybe I just look different in the mirror because I've decided I do, or that I need to be.
I've decided to quit my current internship, a twelve- to fifteen-hour-a-week commitment which has me cutting and pasting photo and video URLs into fancy spreadsheets to make deadlines for an online travel company. Instead, I'll be working as an exhibitions assistant at the International Museum of Women on their current project: Women, Power, and Politics.
It also appears that my trek into the Woodacre hills has borne some fruit: I'm in the process of submitting some freelance pieces for consideration at Diabetes Health. I'm not sure what excites me more: the thought that I might actually get to write for a legitimate publication (something I got the first taste of when I was twelve, and haven't really stopped thirsting for since then), or the fact that I'd actually get to write about something extremely relevant and fresh. It matters to me what I write, and how I write it, and so I feel doubly pumped (nerdy diabetic joke) to try my hand at something local and important.
Climates all around me are changing, and in ways I find comforting.
Commuting Equals Success, Right?
I am a bicylcing commuter.
It helps that I leave the house at an hour when most people are still counting sheep. Going to work is always an adventure: whizzing down this giant hill with the wind whipping at my ears, my scarf streaming out behind me like a flag. Coming home, however, can be a bit of a psychological battle. After seven hours of double-tall-nonfat-lattes and three hours of online travel research, the last thing I want to do is weave between Hondas under the Bay Bridge. All the same, biking can provide some distinct advantages. namely:
Size. I am a very safe biker, yet all the same, I have moments of absurd, overconfident machismo, like passing busses just before they reach their stops (it sucks to have that exhaust in my face), or convincing myself that speeding through a stale green light is just yet another nutritious physical exertion.
My commuting skills were truly put to the test when I went way out into the Woodacre hills for an interview with Diabetes Health Magazine on Monday. It took me three city buses and two and a half hours to get just to the right city. Then I had to hike one mile uphill in the middle of this very pristine, yet uncomfortably empty rural town. I kept thinking of Sister Bear in the Berenstain Bear's Don't Talk toStrangers when she starts seeing every frog and deer as suspicious. Maybe city living has already left an impression on me, because the complete lack of ambient noise began to really creep me out. Every now and then I would come across a stray dog, and there was a surprisingly high population of defunct, rusty trucks. Somehow the echoes of chainsaws followed me uphill, and I found myself missing the constant activity of downtown San Francisco.
The interview itself went well, and I enjoyed meeting the editors and staff. If it weren't for its unfortunate location, I would definintely love working there, but it was just too far to really consider seriously. Apparently their managing editor just recently quit because she was commuting a total of three hours a day to and from San Francisco, and she had her own car.
Maybe it's too much to expect a full-time job now. Maybe I should just setlle for befriending all the valets on my block and be content every time people drop a quarter into my tip box. Maybe there is something greater out there still waiting for me to discover it, or create it. Maybe the minute I stop looking, there it'll be. Maybe there will be some fantastic young man, too, and a health insurance company waiting with open arms. "We love pre-existing conditions!" they'll exclaim, and we'll hug.
Maybe, as Calvin and Hobbes used to say, maybe I'll get a pony.
That would be a cool commute.
Wine-Inspired, Tryptophan-Influenced Philosophy
Sometimes I need to write like I need to run, and my mind puts on its shoes and I stare at the screen the same way I stare at the hills, and wait to take flight. Maybe it's the evening stupor of early winter, or the leftover indulgence of Thanksgiving at home, but I'm overcome with an overwhelming need to document something. A feeling, a sensation, a snapshot, a song, a gesture, a lingering look between strangers. I want so honestly to feel something real, and to record it meaningfully. What does that even mean? What will I ever publish if all I write are rhetorical questions? Is it just a phase? Am I an adultescent?
Last week I went on a blind date that took me to the Savannah Jazz club. We paid entrance, which included a beginner's swing lesson. My partner was a lumbering 6'6", and so we cleared the floor not by skill, but by sheer distance. The air was ripe with possibility and adults seeking something. There's an almost embarrassing honesty to blind dates, because both people are stripped to their most blank canvases. It reminds me of when I used to go on intercambios when I was living in Spain, and would spend a few hours a week meeting up with young Europeans looking to practice their English. It's so easy to idealize a period of time when you were busy idealizing something else.
I started this blog with the intention of keeping it impersonal and professional. Maybe this is where my style of writing departs from the mainstream; because, like a nagging younger sibling, I can't seem to keep my feelings out of what I write. I want to report but it's so unnatural for me to be objective. I want to be a camera that adds no extraneous colors or outlines, just records. I want to be untapped. I'd rather not start every sentence with "I." San Francisco has too much to offer, and so does this world.
My father dropped me off at the Amtrak station this afternoon just as the sunset patterned across the cloudy sky. When I say goodbye to my parents, I always feel the need to repeat "I love you" at least six or ten times, as if the more I say it, the more they'll realize they mean to me. I don't say that to be trite, or even sentimental, but I'm always astonished by how weighty those three words appear when addressing them to anyone but my family. It's automatic, and yet honest. I don't say things I don't mean, and my family has taught me that you work for what you mean.
So what does this have to do with blind dates, and writing, and adultescence? That at some to-be-determined moment, the perfect job or graduate school will slide out of the sky for me, like a life-size Golden Ticket? That somehow all the Venn diagrams of my social and professional life will eventually overlap? That rhetorical questions will one day go out of style?
All I can do now is simply write it all down, whatever pieces that fall, and whichever ones that scatter.
Chinatown, Early Morning
Working as a barista in the early morning makes me an unofficial member of the Union of Unseen People. I felt it this especially strong today, because I was downtown at 6:45 am and the streets were so beautifully deserted. That's the mirage of Unseen People: cycling down Market, and through Chinatown, I become one of them every day: one of those thankless souls sweating through the underground work of everyday life. Today it was the sanitation workers, and construction men grunting through their first cigarette of the day, small Chinese men and women in their sixties doing calisthenics in the park before work, and workers in orange decorating large Christmas trees in business park plazas. The sky was clear, and the air crisp.
I feel a strange mixture of privilege and humility when I work so early in the morning. It's as if I can own the quiescence of a busy street while its shutters are still drawn, as if the streets themselves are just an extension of my imagination. There's a great sense of democracy for us early morning workers, because everyone is the same on a Monday at seven a.m.; nobody's truly started their mental engines, and yet we all have to act like we wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
I passed the Empress of China restaurant today just as the sun was rising, and stopped at the park to use the public restroom. A homeless person of unidentifiable gender was busy washing his/her arms and legs methodically in the sink. Little Asian women hopped in and around me, chatting and stretching, and I suddenly felt geometric, as if a little scale had pushed us all into this room together, and we were undeniably equal. Why shouldn't we be? There are jobs I'd rather have, and people I'd rather date, and places I'd rather see, but that doesn't erase all that I do and everyone I know now.
Lately I've been feeling like my life has become that little dancing needle on a cardiograph, ebbing up and down in jagged spikes. I'm so terrified of mediocrity, and of living a life that is simply satisfactory, or doing a job just because it pays, that I haven't really stopped to digest all that is actually going on. My streets have just stopped buzzing, and everything is getting clearer. A part of me owns this city at six-thirty in the morning, and that's a privilege I wouldn't have if I weren't part of the Union of Unseen People.
Have You Texted God Yet Today?
There was a holiday lighting today on the Embarcadero. Multiculturalism rocked San Francisco. According to www.sf.funcheap.com, the traditional Christmas tree lighting was only one-third of the ceremony: Hannukkah and Kwanzaa customs were also involved.
It's only November 18, and suddenly the year is over.
I grew up in an interfaith household during an era when faith itself was sold on Cheerio's advertisements and Santa Claus Coca-Cola endorsements. I went to public school but Jesus was everywhere. I remember making crucifixes out of popsicle sticks in first grade, then coming home to ask my mom: "So who's this Geejus?" Other kids thought that being half-Jewish meant I got eight times the presents come December, but really it just meant that our family would host loud latke parties and I could play dreidel on the living room floor with my neighbors. At some point, my mom put up Tibetan prayer flags. Friends kept giving me little Buddha statues and scented spiritual candles as holiday gift compromises.
In college, my roommate Kelly and I started referring to the entire autumn/winter period as "Chranikwanzikan." Three years later, I can't help but wonder: Just how much of another tradition should we identify with before we incorporate it into our lives? Is just saying the words enough? Or sending cards? What moments are holier anyway?
As a kid, I always figured that divine inspiration was rather like adult development: as we grew, we would just know things. Or feel them. After I read Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, I used to try kneeling outside on the lawn to see if God would drop me a line, as if I could become some lightning-rod-answering-machine at will. It didn't surprise me when nothing happened.
Maybe God receives texts. But what number would you dial?
I've probably violated several religious codes just by writing this, which is rather like crossing invisible state lines, because the danger is relative. I wonder what kind of spectacle a Chranikwanzikan lighting/celebration would provide, and if the air was crackling with heightened spiritual electricity. What would God write?
"You forgot Thanksgiving."
My Swallow Song
On Tuesday evening I had the rare opportunity to see an opera. It was my first; never before had I entered that grandiose San Francisco Opera House, nor had I ever perched so high above an orchestra pit. The tickets came courtesy of my friend and roommate Erin's parents, who are regular opera patrons and could not make the November performance of Puccini's La Rondine.
A brief visual sketch:
Two young women, one dressed in a slinky black dress and new coat, the other in a teal tulle dress and too-tight black pea coat (a la SPCA thrift), squished into the MUNI's concave bucket seats. A cool, dark night descends upon the city, dazzlingly devoid of fog. Clip clop as they giggle past the Civic Center and count the steps up to the War Memorial Opera House, this colossus of marble like a large-shouldered man in a dapper blazer, standing proud and glittering amongst the whipping city streets.
First impression:
High, scalloped ceilings, bourgeois men and women wearing anything from low-backed hazel gowns to workday slacks, all shadowed by this haunting sensation of history. I simultaneously loved and hated that overwhelming feeling of class; grateful to have gotten a free ticket, I really was peering into a goldfish bowl of richer people's entertainment. What a privilege--and I do mean that in all sincerity.
The story:
La Rondine (the Sparrow) startled me in its frank approach to sexuality. Puccini wrote this in the period leading up to Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death before World War I, and his operetta both embodies and satirizes the height of sentimentalism. Luckily, translations were provided on a neat screen that hung above the set, and not only were they succinct and helpful, but they added a charm all of their own. Erin and I were startled at how colloquial they could be (i.e. "Gimme two beers!"), and I was very grateful to understand the constant Italian dialogue.
Magda de Civry is the protagonist, a glamorous Cleopatra-esque mistress to a rich man. In the opening scene, she is laying amidst the one of the set's luxurious recliners, framed on all sides by waiting women and marble pillars. Prunier, the resident poet (I really enjoyed how he was referred to as "O Poet!" so lavishly throughout; it gave me secret hope) offered an annoying song about "the dream of Doretta;" a classic man-with-power-offers-security-to-a-girl-in-exchange-for-sexual-favors fairy tale which Magda puts wonderfully on its head. She leans herself against his piano and her body fills like a swan opening its wings--she sings ""Chi il bel sogno di Doretta," offering an updated version in which Doretta kisses a stranger in a bar and is forever haunted by his mystery. I felt an unmistakable kinship with her in that gut-wrenching solo--most everyone would, I think, the way she grabbed the air with her lungs and held it by the throat.
Why shouldn't a woman remember her first love affair that way?
The story takes a predictable turn from then on; a young man comes to stay at her lover's house, and after taking suggestions from Magda's sassy chambermaid Lisette (hands-down the best character), she disguises herself and wanders out for a night on the town. Inevitably, they end up at the same table, and inevitably, they fall in love over two beers and a few coy jokes. The signature catch: Magda lies about her identity, and is later caught by her lover, who accepts the end of their relationship by saying: "Have your fun and I hope you don't get too hurt." Cue foreshadow in minor key.
The story's innate tragedy, which made me all the more grateful not to be born a hundred years earlier: Magda cannot marry her new man (Ruggero) because she is not a virgin, and therefore not pure. Sound familiar? Sounds like Milton, sounds like Chaucer, sounds like Shakespeare, sounds like the wrist-slapping hand of Caucasian literary history.
To be fair, plot was only about thirty percent of my first opera experience. There were the acoustics--this fabulously spacious room dripping in brocade and dashing centerpiece chandeliers. There were the costumes--gorgeous dresses and dandyish tails. And the set--larger than most San Francisco dwellings. The symphony was immaculate and beautifully underscored.
Verdict?
My manager at work said: "There are two reactions to opera: one is that you are overwhelmed by visceral reaction, and you can't stop crying. That means you're hooked, and you keep going back. The other is that you enjoyed it but weren't so affected by it." I had two moments of almost-tears: the first was Magda's Swallow song, in which she expressed that youthful desire for adventure and the promise of an unknown love, and the second was in the bar when she and Ruggero share their first kiss, and the entire rest of the cast surrounds them, chanting quietly: "Let us be quiet while they share their love." What honest acknowledgment of someone else's happiness, however fleeting it might be. What a refreshing challenge to the rest of the opera's moral trajectory: that it is all right to feel something for someone, and even better to appreciate it openly.
Otherwise, I was rather taken by the entire spectacle of opera. In a way, going there this week paralleled many other aspects of my life right now: torn between wanting to belong and trying desperately to appear different, straddling a history I have yet to understand and a future I have yet to define.
Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night
Two controversial news items in two minutes:
Fifty-eight thousand tons of fuel was spilled into the San Francisco Bay on Wednesday, November 7, when a container ship crashed into a Bay Bridge tower, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Two alleged causes: Fog. Language miscommunication.
Two classic symptoms of human error, and yet they reveal a lot about geographic and sociocultural assumptions here in San Francisco. As a barista who has never boarded a major fuel carrier, nor braved the Bay in its densest, pea-soup fog, my first thought upon hearing the news was: "How could they hit a bridge?"
The immediate images that rushed to my mind as I scrubbed counters and steamed milk was of those tragic public ads I used to see on PBS as child (after the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, circa June 1990) of seals covered in tar, small pelicans choking on six-pack soda containers, and drowning, despicable sea life. Oil spills are one example of how we as humans can successfully cancel out all our nonprofit, free-trade, morally conscious do-gooding in one fell swoop. Who knew that a pair of mismatched coordinates could kill as many as 100 birds as far away as Tomales Bay? And how must that crew feel, knowing that one Thursday morning in the Bay could transform an entire underwater ecosystem?
Which brings me to the second conclusion: do all problems in this world boil down to basic miscommunication? The SFGate article alludes to questions regarding the crew's English fluency, although a spokesperson is quoted as saying that the ship's master and crew are all fluent speakers. Somehow even the hint of language ability makes me rile my feathers of political correctness, especially because the inherent error of this catastrophe is at its base entirely human: a missed connection, an unclear command, a mental and literal fog.
Two more twos:
The last Bay Area oil spill of parallel destruction was in 1996, and it took two years to clean 40,000 tons (a mere dab, in comparison).
The San Francisco Triathlon had to cancel its swimming portion, tailoring it down to two events and skirting the obvious risks of contaminated water.
My mother is an admirable open-water swimmer who just braved the Bay waters this past spring. She mentioned that her friends who do the Alcatraz swim used to jump-start their workouts by jumping off boats. All this time I thought the greatest threat in the Bay were sharks.
I'd like to write something prophetic about how this oil spill epitomizes innate human flaw, or showcases the inevitability of random disaster, or proves us that big car culture breeds bad karma, but I find it hard to pin the suffering of underwater creatures on the wandering misjudgment of a tired ship's crew.
Poor birds.
Lavar Burton (one of my heroes) would have an accompanying children's book to suggest, or a one-sentence motif to thread all this together. I wish he were here with us now.
Death and the Residentially Challenged
Dia de los Muertos en the San Francisco Mission is death at its best.
Last night, my roommates and I walked down to 24th and Bryant, where we felt the procession nearing before we saw it. The streets were pulsing with an innate bass, and the smell of Latin American incense was filling the air. Men, women, children, and pets were painted with white faces and black stitched-up ghostly grins, bearing tall memorial candles and arranging altars. The effect was startling and earthy, as if the barrier between sky and ground was reduced to the smoke spiraling off the candles, and a truer, deeper side to life was brought out in death's face.
There were several drum corps, a few Irish bands with banjos and fiddles, and one performing arts middle school dance troupe. Many women filed by in period costumes with bustiers painted black, halos of holiday lights in their hair, pushing strollers full of photos and memorabilia of lost loved ones.
It was a more heartfelt Halloween, a spiritual mixture of eulogies and symphonies. We wandered over to Garfield Park, where a number of elaborate altars were displayed, some of them hanging off trees or constructed on the sides of playgrounds. Perhaps the most moving was a long, low table set about a foot off the ground, where about a dozen people sat, praying, offering food and photographs. I wanted to take a picture, but it seemed sacrilegious, as if I were walking into a family crypt to steal bones. It was a different kind of Thanksgiving, one devoted to family, spouses, and friends. I overheard a little girl talking to her parents' friend:
"Who is your candle for?" she asked.
"People who have AIDS," he replied.
And suddenly it brought me back down to a darker reality of San Francisco, and its whole-hearted attempts to provide enough for its residents. Our election is this Tuesday, and when my roommate Heather was reading local ballot measures, she stumbled across a man named Grasshopper who is running for mayor. He described himself as "residentially challenged" for several years. His belief was that he had seen enough of San Francisco's problems versus its overwhelming possibilities, and in a way I have to agree with him. Homeless people make up a great percentage of this city, and their lifestyles must reflect the environment in which they inhabit. I work in the Financial District, and live in a different neighborhood, and yet I still feel a palpable difference when biking home. What must they see in this city?
Who would they be lighting their candles for?
Perhaps they are the perfect embodiment of this limbo between earth and sky, day and night, life and death. Cliche as it may sound, el Dia de los Muertos has brought out a more honest, organic vibe, and it isn't just the incense or the music. Every day in this city heightens my senses a little more, and I'm grateful.
San Francisco Bathroom Scriptures
Read off the bathroom wall at a funky coffee shop on the corner of Dolores and 17th:
"I Hate Bicycling Hipsters"
This was followed closely thereafter by:
"I Hate Pretentious Hipsters Who Can't Bike"
I was struck by the self-deprecating, ultra-progressive graffiti on the wall. Not only were all opinions expressed, but each one had an equally eloquent reaction. On the opposite wall I read, "Dianne Feinstein doesn't really care," to which her opponent had written, "Oh, but she does."
What surprised me wasn't how tame the comments were, but how everything on the wall was treated like a continuing conversation. It gave me the impression that these women revisited the same bathroom just to pick up where they left off.
Somehow the act of restroom reactions epitomizes the Californian tendency to be both uber-sensitive and self-righteous. I never understood the height of West Coast political correctness until I moved to Europe to study abroad, and I was struck dumb by how directly and forwardly people spoke. I realized that this self-aware sensation of always looking over our shoulders as we speak was at times particular even to California. My American friends in Europe were from Boston and Philadelphia; they wore high heels every day and cracked race and sex jokes without blinking twice. My Spanish friends were unapologetically frank, and surprised when I expressed fear about voicing strong opinions. I grew used to answering very one-sided, pointed questions (e.g. "Why did your country vote for Bush?", "Why don't you have a boyfriend?", "Most Jews support Israel. Do you?") without getting defensive.
So why this interest in bathroom graffiti? On some level, this represents the rawest form of human communication. In the bathroom, we are all just bodies seeking relief, and at times, a soapbox.
My last weekend in Malaga, I took a picture of a small drawing on the bus station bathroom wall. It read:
Julia, eres mi diosa
Julia, you are my goddess
I felt dirty taking photos in a public restroom, but there was something heartfelt in the curved handwriting. It was a direct expression of true feeling, and other bathroom graffiti artists had left that corner carefully alone, as if recognizing a shared sentiment.
That's how I'll choose to interpret it, now that I am thousands of miles away, contemplating the exact definition of "hipster" as I strap on my helmet and wander into the growing crowd.
Stacking Cups
Life in the service industry makes me want to memorize the Quadratic Equation.
It's a natural thread, really: working four hours a day, five days a week, in a green apron and vanilla clothes is enough to make anyone desire something a little more weighty. I'm not knocking the importance of a perfectly-brewed cup of coffee, nor can I deny the need for a steady wage and guaranteed health insurance. (Side note: Bush really shouldn't have vetoed that health care bill for needy children). What I am suggesting is the need for intellectual filler.
I have decided that I should pursue an advanced degree, for perhaps a dozen competing reasons, but the number one being that it buys me more time to become a professional.
Professional what? Writer? Teacher? Activist? Blogger? Wait, can you be a professional blogger? Will there someday be a communications minor entitled "Blogosophy?"
Life has been a series of tiered goals, one stacked highly atop the next like coffee cups, and now that I have approached this last rung, I feel myself throwing my hands up in hopes that whatever it is I might do will just fall right down into my lap. And then I find myself sitting atop Bernal Heights hill just after dusk, cloaked in pre-Halloween fog, reviewing algebra for the GREs (graduate school entrance exams).
Algebra. The only thing I remember from my ninth-grade math class was that every day after lunch, Frankie Marquez would erase the class title and rewrite it as Al's Bra. Every Friday was food day in our class and we got extra credit if we brought baked goods. This would explain why the Quadratic Equation appeared so intimidating when I cracked open "Algebra for Dummies" (a good book, especially if you are not dumb) and tried out a few problem sets.
In the end, this all comes back to the service industry, and the rhythm of brewing tea and managing a cash register: you memorize what you need to know to get where you want to be.
Last night, walking home from the bus station, I sang the rhyme that my roommate Erin taught me (and it really works):
negative bee plus or minus radical bee squared minus four a cee all over two aay
Somehow this will bring me where I want to be. I'm not sure yet how, or where, or when, and until then I might be stacking cups.
I can live with that.
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