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.
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KSu
{ 12:21, 2007-Nov-26 }
{ Posted by mikkaa }
<br>http://ksu.edu.sa
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